Language Classification in Western Amazonia: Advances in Favor of the Pano-Takana Hypothesis

The languages of the Pano and Takana families exhibit a considerable number of lexical and structural affinities that cannot be ascribed to mere chance and are not readily detectable instances of borrowing. After the comparative studies by Key (1968) and Girard (1971) the proposal of a genetic relationship between these two families was generally accepted (e.g. Loos 1973, 2005; Suárez 1973; Kaufman 1990; Campbell 1997). Without solid argumentation, however, this classification was later put into question (Fabre 1998; Loos 1999; Fleck 2013) and, even today, there is no full consensus as to whether the observed similarities are due to genetic inheritance or long-term language contact. The present paper offers lexical and grammatical evidence in support of the hypothesis that Pano and Takana are genetically connected. Comparing for the first time what can be considered Proto-Pano and Proto-Takana reconstructions, it is shown that 18 of the 40 items in the basic vocabulary list proposed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (asjp) (Holman et al. 2008) might be cognate; this includes 9 body-part terms. Also, a set of alleged grammatical cognates are assembled, and shared constructions involving motion verbal morphology, intransive and transitive auxiliaries, transitivity harmony restrictions, and switch-reference are discussed

Naming Strategies and Ethnobiological Nomenclature in Kakataibo (Panoan, Peru)

The present paper describes and illustrates the main naming strategies attested in a lexical database of 1233 Kakataibo names of plant and animals. Seven naming strategies are proposed for Kakataibo ethnobiological nomenclature: coining, morphological derivation, borrowing, ethnobiological polysemy, compounding and grammatical nominalization (the latter two being exclusively associated with lexically complex forms). Kakataibo ethnobiological terminology overally follows the general word-formation patterns available in the language, but it will be argued that some types of compounds and grammatical nominalizations found in the database are constraint to names of plants and animal. Indeed, one particular type of lexicalized grammatical nominalization seems to be cross-linguistically unusual

Higher-order categories in Kakataibo (Pano) ethnobiological classification: complexity and simplicity in the taxonomic system of an Amazonian ethnic group

This paper offers the first characterization of the ethnobiological taxonomic system used by the Kakataibo people (Pano, Peru) to classify and organize their knowledge about nature. The study follows the six ranks proposed for folk taxonomies (see Berlin et al 197; Berlin 1992), but the data suggest that the Kakataibo taxonomic system exhibits an extra taxonomic level in association with culturally and perceptually more salient categories, producing highly complex classifications (non-salient categories exhibit much simpler internal organizations). This paper also demonstrates the existence of overlapping plant classifications, which seem to be relevant for the understanding of the whole Kakataibo taxonomic system

Untangling the Evolution of Body-Part Terminology in Pano: Conservative versus Innovative Traits in Body-Part Lexicalization

Although language-family specific traits which do not find direct counterparts outside a given language family are usually ignored in quantitative phylogenetic studies, scholars have made ample use of them in qualitative investigations, revealing their potential for identifying language relationships. An example of such a family specific trait are body-part expressions in Pano languages, which are often lexicalized forms, composed of bound roots (also called body-part prefixes in the literature) and non-productive derivative morphemes (called here body-part formatives). We use various statistical methods to demonstrate that whereas body-part roots are generally conservative, body-part formatives exhibit diverse chronologies and are often the result of recent and parallel innovations. In line with this, the phylogenetic structure of body-part roots projects the major branches of the family, while formatives are highly non-tree-like. Beyond its contribution to the phylogenetic analysis of Pano languages, this study provides significative insights into the role of grammatical innovations for language classification, the origin of morphological complexity in the Amazon and the phylogenetic signal of specific grammatical traits in language families

Linking endangerment databases and descriptive linguistics: An assessment of the use of terms relating to language endangerment in grammars

The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding of the language endangerment progression as well as its possible reversal. In the present paper, we explore the terminological correlates of this development as found in the descriptive linguistic literature, using a corpus of over 10,000 digitized grammatical descriptions. Comparing this with existing endangerment databases, we find that simply counting terms related to endangerment does signal endangerment, but the degree of endangerment is more difficult to assess from grammatical descriptions. The label endangered seems to be an umbrella term that covers different situations ranging from moribund languages with less than ten speakers to minority languages with several thousand speakers. For many languages considered endangered in existing databases, explicit terms to this effect cannot be found in their descriptions. The discrepancy is due to incompleteness of the searchterm set, gaps in the literature, and projected rather than observed information in the databases. Our explorations illustrate the potential for database curation assisted by computational searches both to maintain accuracy of the databases and to investigate assumed language endangerment. Future work includes a larger cloud of search terms, usage of term frequencies, and prescreening of descriptive literature for the existence of a relevant section. From the perspective of descriptive linguistics, this study calls for a more careful correlation between the language endangerment indexes, as developed in the global endangerment databases, and the treatment of the endangerment status of individual languages in descriptive grammars.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

How to commentate a soccer match in Shipibo-Konibo (Pano)?

The present paper lists and illustrates eleven strategies that are systematically used by Shipibo-Konibo speakers in order to comment live soccer matches in the context of an indigenous soccer cup informally called “Mundialito Shipibo”. We argue that these lexical, morphosyntactic and discursive strategies can be classified into three types according to their function: iconic strategies, which attempt to present the information more vividly (onomatopoeic forms and ideophones, reduplications, parallel structures and hearsay-quotatives); emotional strategies, which are used by soccer commentators to express their emotions and their feelings (interjections, player-directed speech and diminutives); and proximity strategies, which bring the speech closer to the Shipibo-Konibo audience (lexical Shipibo-Konibo innovations, vocatives, evidential access configurations and code alternations). These various strategies are crucial for understanding the new social dynamics that the Shipibo-Konibo language is getting into as a consequence of becoming an urban language, and are clearly creating a new speech genre. The new social uses that the Shipibo-Konibo people are giving to their language and the features that the language is developing in this new social context are crucial to understand the future of Shipibo-Konibo and other minority languages in Peru

UniMorph 4.0:Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet