Gramática muisca

Angel López-García
Universidad de Valencia

La lengua muisca es un idioma del grupo chibcha que se hablaba en la sabana de Bogotá y que se extinguió en el siglo XVIII. Llegó a ser "lengua general" del Virreinato de Nuevo Granada: ello nos ha permitido conservar cuatro gramáticas manuscritas de la época. La importancia de la gramática muisca para reconstruir el phylum genético y tipológico de las lenguas amerindias es considerable: entre los idiomas chibchas, bien conocidos, de Costa Rica y Panamá, y las lenguas páez de Ecuador, hay un immenso vacío lingüístico en los Andes y en la costa columbiana en el que el español ha ocupado los antiguos espacios indígenas. Tan sólo el tunebo, casi extinguido, parece pertenecer al mismo grupo que el muisca.

La presente gramática se ha realizado cotejando las cuatro versiones manuscritas existentes e intentando reconstruir lo que sería el sistema gramatical muisca tras hacer abstracción de las distorsiones que el modelo latino de las "Artes" misioneras ha introducido en el mismo. Para ello se ha adoptado un punto de vista cognitivo y pragmático susceptible de relacionar la lingüística con la etnología. En cada caso se trata de determinar la contribución de los distintos procedimientos gramaticales al establecimiento de las escenas verbales que cada secuencia refleja. La obra consta de seis partes: Introducción, Método, Verbo, Nombre, Especificadores y Oración.

Angel López-García es catedrático de Lingüística General y director del Instituto Valenciano de Lengua y Cultura Amerindias. Ha trabajado sobre lenguas chibchas, sobre el tronco tupí-guaraní y sobre metodología etnolingüística. En la actualidad dirige un proyecto de investigación sobre "Etnolingüística amerindia: la visión del mundo de las lenguas indígenas", financiado por la C.I.C.Y.T.

ISBN 9783929075533. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 01. 120pp. 1995.

Language and Culture in Native North America

Studies in Honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow

Michael Dürr, Egon Renner & Wolfgang Oleschinski (ed.)

The present volume is a collection of twenty-one articles on North American languages and cultures written by American and German scholars in honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. The articles are distributed in four sections according to their content: the Na-Dene controversy, linguistics studies, discourse studies, and anthropological studies. A fifth section includes an article as a personal homage to Pinnow and other information about his life and his work.

Part 1: The Na-Dene Controversy: M. Dürr & E. Renner, The History of the Na-Dene Controversy: A Sketch. With an Addendum by Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. - E. Renner, The Structure of the Na-Dene Controversy: A Metatheoretical Explanation. - M. Dürr & G. Whittaker, The Methodological Background to the Na-Dene Controversy: Some Notes Bearing on Pinnow's Approach.

Part 2: Linguistic Studies: E.-D. Cook, Syllable Structure and Sound Change in Athapaskan. - K.-H. Gursky, Some Grammatical Evidence for the Hokan Stock. - J. Leer, The History of a Tlingit Name. - St. Liedtke, The Etymology of Tlingit tl'ukwx. R. Pustet, The Lakota Article. - H.-J. Sasse, The Evolution of Person Prefixes in the Iroquoian Languages and its Functional Background. - H. Seiler, Possession and Classifiers in Cahuilla. - W. Winter, Reduplicated Forms in Walapai.

Part 3: Discourse Studies: N. Marks Dauenhauer & R. Dauenhauer, A Tlingit Cerimonial Speech by Willie Marks. - E.A. Edwards, "It´s an Ill Wind". - E.A. Edwards & C.M. Eastman, Fried Bread: A Recipe for the Structure of Haida Oral Narrative. - D. Hymes, Na-Dene Ethnopoetics. A Preliminary Report: Haida and Tlingit. - G.L. Story, An Analyzed Tlingit Procedural Text.

Part 4: Anthropological Studies: J.R. Baker, Disintegration and Reintegration: A Reexamination of the Transformation of Handsome Lake. - E. Kasten, Community development in a Kwakiutl Indian village. - W. Manig, Continuity and Change in Western Apache Ceremonialism: A Pictoral Record of Na'ííées (Girls' Puberty Cermony).

Part 5: Personal Reminiscences: E. Renner, Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. - Bibliography and Curriculum Vitae of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow.

ISBN 9783895860041. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 02. 496pp. Photographs. 1995.

Gramática Wixarika I

José Luis Iturrioz
& Paula Gómez López
Departamento de Estudios en Lenguas Indígenas de la Universidad de Gadalajara

El primer volumen comienza con una breve exposición de algunas características del pueblo huichol, de la lengua y la cultura, del territorio y la manera en que conciben sus relaciones con los parientes indígenas y los vecinos mestizos. Sigue una descripción de la estructura fonológica actual del huichol, comparándola con la del náhuatl y el español, y una reconstrucción de la evolución de la fonología desde el siglo XVI a partir de un análisis diacrónico de los préstamos léxicos que ha tomado del español desde los inicios de la Colonia en el XVI.

Siendo el huichol una lengua casi sin historia documentada, este análisis diacrónico de los préstamos arroja mucha luz sobre los contactos entre las dos lenguas y también sobre la etnohistoria. El capítulo 3 presenta una exposición detallada de las características tipológicas de la gramática; el tipo polisiténtico se desdobla en una serie de características específicas como la marcación nuclear, varios tipos de incorporación, la explicitud, el genio centralizante y verbalizante, y se analizan las consecuencias para la sintaxis, el léxico y la organización del texto. En el capítulo 4 se lleva a cabo un análisis pormenorizado de todos los errores de las descripciones taxonómicas llevadas a cabo con anterioridad a nuestro proyecto.

INDICE

Prólogo
Abreviaturas

CAPITULO 1: LOS WIXARITARI EN LA HISTORIA
1.1 Territorio, pueblo y lengua
1.2 Los sistemas onímicos
1.3 La variación lingüística, la escritura y la escrituralidad

CAPITULO 2: FONOLOGÍA
2.1 Nota preliminar
2.2. Los fonemas consonánticos del huichol
2.3 Los fonemas vocálicos del huichol
2.4 Reglas de combinación de fonemas
2.5 Fonología diacrónica: reconstrucción del contacto entre lenguas a través de la estratificación histórica de los préstamos
2.6 Etapas diacrónicas
2.7 Niveles y dimensiones
2.8 Reglas y tendencias
2.9 Gradualidad y discontinuidad
2.10 Vigencia de las reglas y desfases
2.11 Valor diagnóstico
2.12 Variación diatópica: dialectos orientales y occidentales
2.13 Peculiaridades de los préstamos en la onomástica personal
2.14 Los préstamos y la etnohistoria
2.15 Origen e historia de la palabra huichol
2.15.1 Etimologías infundadas

CAPITULO 3: EL GENIO DE LA LENGUA HUICHOL
3.1 Incorporación y polisíntesis
3.2 Head-marking
3.3 Complejidad de la palabra en huichol: M/P
3.4 Explicitud y descriptividad de la palabra en huichol: M/E
3.5 Lenguas centralizantes y lenguas distributivas
3.6 Predominancia verbal
3.7 Estrategias de centralización
3.8 Consecuencias sintácticas
3.9 Consecuencias para el léxico
3.10 Consecuencias para el texto
3.11 Palabras kurui: límites de la palabra y cohesión interna
3.12 Los parámetros de la tipología morfológica

CAPITULO 4: LA MORFOLOGIA TAXONOMICA
4.1 Estrategias de análisis y método expositivo
4.2 Las descripciones taxonómicas: lingüística sensorial
4.3 Algunas premisas básicas del análisis distribucional
4.4. Diez categorías de errores
4.5 Resumen y conclusiones

Bibliografía

ISBN 9783895860614. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 03. Vol I. 268pp. 2006.

Possession in Yucatec Maya

Structures - functions - typology



Christian Lehmann
University of Erfurt

Possession is the functional domain of language which crystallizes around the relation of human beings to entities which are in their immediate bio-cultural sphere. Such entities crucially include relatives, body parts and artifacts. Nouns designating such concepts usually display grammatical symptoms of relationality in the languages of the world. Non-inherent relations between other kinds of objects are either shaped on this model or marked against it.

This is a comprehensive study of possession in Yucatec Maya, essentially based on fieldwork. The grammatical categories relevant to this domain are defined in structural terms. The description is then subdivided according to the role of possession in reference and in predication. Yucatec Maya has an unusually rich grammatical structure in this domain, with a classification of nouns according to alienability, morphological operations of relationalization and derelationalization of nouns and a large paradigm of possessive classifiers. The study concludes with a chapter on the typological specificity of Yucatec in this domain and on the connections of the relevant structures to the rest of the grammar.

ISBN 9783895860607. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 04. 170pp. 2nd edition. 1998.

Linguistic Acculturation in Mopan Maya

A study of language change in Belizean Mopan due to Spanish and English culture and language contact



Lieve Verbeeck


Mopan is a language of the Yucatecan Maya family, spoken by about 10 000 people in the Eastern Petén, Guatemala, and Southern Belize. This study focusses at the native language of the 3 000 Belizean Mopan speakers, who, after 2 centuries of contact with the Spanish language and culture, are experiencing now, as fourth generation immigrants a second contact stage with Belizean Creole English. Belizean Mopan is unusual among the Mayan languages in displaying only slight structural Spanish interferences. The systematic study of Mopan lexicon reveals that Spanish influence has not penetrated in an equal measure the various domains of importance to Mopan society. The persistence of the native lexicon related to the studied domains gives an indication of continuity in various aspects of traditional Mopan culture.

In the section on phonological interferences a significant finding concerns a sound change in exclusively Spanish loanwords, which indicates that Mopan speakers possess some unconscious awareness of the foreign status of part of their lexicon. A large portion of the research was devoted to the question of how Mopan speakers incorporated the different borrowed parts of speech into the Mopan linguistic structure. Among the interesting characteristics of the grammatical interference analysis are the neutral status of nouns, the incorporation of loanverbs into an agentive subclass of the intransitive verb category, the native character of comparative constructions, the doublet constructions in the use of discourse markers.

ISBN 9783895861031. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 05. 120pp. 1998.

A  Reference Grammar of Warao

Andrés Romero-Figeroa
Universidad de Oriente, Nucleo de Sucre

Warao is a language isolate of Venezuela. The approximately 15,000 Warao currently live in the swampy areas next to the hundreds of cañes through which the Orinoco river flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the Warao are bilingual in Warao and Spanish to varying degrees. Many Warao monolinguals are still found in the easternmost areas of the Orinoco Delta.

A Reference Grammar of Warao is the result of 20 years of research on that language basing on various field work sessions. The goals of the research are twofold: to present a typologically-oriented reference grammar of the language, and to describe, on the grounds of sociolinguistic data, the speech styles observed in Warao. The study contains the following sections:

Section I: Generalities, Section II: Syntax (with chapters on the Order of constituents in the basic simplex sentence, Verbal sentences, Copulative sentences, Stative sentences, Complex structures, Questions, Negation, Direct speech, Reflexives/reciprocals, Focus,Ellipsis, Anaphora, Relatives), Section III: Morphology (Nouns, Determiners, Numerals, Pronouns, Adverbials, Postpositions, Verbs and the verb phrase), Section IV: Phonology, Section V: Style. A Reference Grammar of Warao is also an attempt to widen the scope of information about the still little known languages of the Amazon-Orinoco basin in lowland South America.

ISBN 9783895861048. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 06. with photo-section. 160pp. 1997.

Aspectos Tipológicos da Língua Javaé

Marcus Maia
Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Quinta da Boa Vista

The Javae dialect of the Karaja language of the Macro-Je stock is analyzed in terms of current typological theories. The objective of this analysis is to provide a more integrated perspective into the grammar of this language and, at the same time, to check the descriptive and explanatory power of typological models.

The first chapter presents a review of the typological literature on word order, discussing the models of Greenberg, Lehman, Vennemann and Hawkins.The second chapter focuses on Javae word order typology and checks several structural patterns and processes of this language against the theories discussed in Chapter 1. Chapter 3 shows the existence in Javae of some characteristic features of the active typology. Finally, the last chapter presents data that indicate the occurrence of an accusative-ergative split in the verb-agreement system of Javae. [written in Portuguese]

ISBN 9783895862373. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 11. 150pp. 1998.

A Reconstruction of Proto-Taranoan: Phonology and Inflectional Morphology

Sergio Meira
MPI Nijmegen / Museu Goeldi

Comparative and classificatory studies of Cariban languages, despite their long history (starting with Gilij in 1782), have been few and unsatisfactory, mainly due to the lack of necessary documentation of the languages in question. Based on a large amount of new descriptive data, as well as on published sources, the present work attempts to demonstrate the closer genetic relationship between a subgroup of three Cariban languages, Akuriyó, Tiriyó and Karihona, the last two of which were considered to belong to very distant branches of the family in a still widely cited classification (Durbin 1977). This demonstration takes the form of a reconstruction of the main aspects of the segmental phonology and inflectional morphology (person, number, evidentiality, tense/aspect/mood) of the proto-language, which the author proposes to call Proto-Taranoan. A preliminary etymological dictionary, as well as some remarks on the history of the speakers, is also included.

ISBN 9783895865343. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 30. 260pp. 2000.

Phonological Study of the Karo Language (Brazil)

Nilson Gabas, Jr.
Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belèm

Karo is a Brazilian language spoken in the Amazon region (in Rondônia State) by about 150 Arara Indians.

Even though the Arara are in contact with the white population since the 40's, and most of them understand Portuguese, Karo is exclusively used for communication among themselves.

Preliminary anthropological research shows that the Arara Indians always lived in the same region they live now, although presently they share their reservation, the Área Indígena Igarapé de Lourdes, with the Gavião and Zoró Indians, (speakers of a dialect of Gavião), without any linguistic interference over each other.

As is the case with the majority of the Brazilian Indian languages, there was almost nothing known about Karo in the past besides few wordlists published by some ethnologists (Lévi-Strauss, 1950; Nimuendaju, 1925,1955, Rondon, 1948; and Schultz, 1955). This thesis, thus, is meant as a contribution to the description and documentation of Karo, specially its phonology and part of its morphology. It is presented as follows.

In Chapter 1 the phonetic segments of the language and their patterns of occurrence are presented. By the classic criteria for phonemicization (free variation, complementary distribution and contrasting) an inventory of surface phonemes is then established.

Chapter 2 describes the syllabic patterns, and Chapter 3 deals with the rules of nasalization spread. In Chapter 4 the three types of internal sandhi found in Karo are described. Chapter 5 deals with stress. Basically, it is shown that stress placement is predictable from three distinct phonological factors: tone, nasality, and the onset of the last syllable of the words.

Finally, Chapter 6 is dedicated to tone. It is demonstrated that although Karo has three phonetic tone levels, low, mid and high, only two are contrastive, low and high. It is also described a process of tone assimilation which is conditioned by consonantal segments.

ISBN 9783895865367. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 31. 80pp. 1998.