2. Language and Identity : The Case of Lowland Amazonian Bolivia

Crevels Mily. 2. Language and Identity : The Case of Lowland Amazonian Bolivia . In: Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, tome 17, n°7-12, 2006. pp. 370-379

Itonama o sihnipadara, lengua no clasificada de la Amazonía boliviana

The purpose of this paper is to give a preliminary sketch of some interesting structural features of Itonama, a moribund indigenous language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, against the historic and sociolinguistic background of the area. Greenberg's (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a subbranch of Macro-Chibchan, has not been supported by other linguists and the language is still considered to be an isolate or rather an unclassified language. Itonama is a head-marking VSO language, which marks gender on the verb and distinguishes masculine and feminine gender in pronouns and demonstratives. It has a multiple classifier system and only two open word classes: verbs and nouns. While its nominal morphology seems quite transparent, the verbal morphology is much more complex with various prefix and suffix slots, verbal classifiers -which also appear on demonstratives-, body-part incorporation, and verbal number

Itonama o Sihnipadara, lengua no clasificada de la Amazonia boliviana

The purpose of this paper is to give a preliminary sketch of some interesting structural features of Itonama, a moribund indigenous language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, against the historic and sociolinguistic background of the area. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a subbranch of Macro-Chibchan, has not been supported by other linguists and the language is still considered to be an isolate or rather an unclassified language. Itonama is a head-marking VSO language, which marks gender on the verb and distinguishes masculine and feminine gender in pronouns and demonstratives. It has a multiple classifier system and only two open word classes: verbs and nouns. While its nominal morphology seems quite transparent, the verbal morphology is much more complex with various prefix and suffix slots, verbal classifiers —which also appear on demonstratives—, body-part incorporation, and verbal number

Subordination strategies in Tupian languages

Abstract: Assessing the internal coherence and constituency of language families often centers either around comparing certain form-meaning correspondences, or around identifying the presence or absence of linguistic features across the members of the family. The former approach is generally restricted to the lexicon. The latter approach focuses mostly on structural characteristics of language. In this paper we present an alternative approach to comparing grammatical systems between languages within a language family, which aims at bringing these two approaches and their results closer to each other. We look at subordination strategies in a sample of Tupian languages, taking constructions as the basic unit of comparison, treating them as form-meaning correspondences. The Tupian family offers an especially intriguing case for studying subordination strategies in the South American context, given its enormous geographical spread and the variety of contact situations involving its member languages. Major patterns of subordination strategies can be discerned across the family, e.g. strategies involving nominalization, verbal incorporation and other subtypes of verbal serialization, but there is also a great degree of variability between the different languages. By mapping the structural diversity onto the known genealogy and geographic distribution, we hope to shed more light on the history of the Tupian family and on the diffusability of subordination strategies