Lexical choice in Karo narratives

This paper looks at two verbal descriptions of the Pear film and characterizes them according to the analysis proposed by Downing (1980) for factors influencing lexical choice. The two descriptions, one short and one long, were told by my Karo consultant, Mário Jorge Arara, after the exhibition of the film. Generally, the present article looks at Downing's assertion that "if the description is to be brief, words of broad referential scope are likely to be chosen (...). If the speaker opts for a more detailed description, more lexemes of narrower referential scope are likely to appear" (1980:90) and sees how this assertion applies to the two narratives. Specifically, it looks at each of the versions of the story and tries to explain the mentions of the referents by either basic or non-basic level categories in terms of cognitive, textual and contextual factors

Genealogical relations and lexical distances within the Tupian linguistic family

Abstract: In this paper we present the first results of the application of computational methods, inspired by the ideas in McMahon & McMahon (2005), to a dataset collected from languages of every branch of the Tupian family (including all living non-Tupí-Guaraní languages) in order to produce a classification of the family based on lexical distance. We used both a Swadesh list (with historically stabler terms) and a list of animal and plant names for results comparison. In addition, we also selected more (HiHi) and less (LoLo) stable terms from the Swadesh list to form sublists for indepedent treatment. We compared the resulting NeighborNet networks and neighbor-joining cladograms and drew conclusions about their significance for the current understanding of the classification of Tupian languages. One important result is the lack of support for the currently discussed idea of an Eastern-Western division within Tupí