






It should be obvious, then, why I was very excited to read about WeSay. Before I provide a brief description, let be add that apart from the LD&C article, information can also be obtained at the WeSay website (, which includes a page of screenshots and Flash movies that illustrate how the program works (here).




Two talks in Lima

May 16, 2008

I am presently in Lima, getting on with the logistical and bureaucratic preparations for fieldwork this summer. Of possible interest to readers in Peru, however, I will also be giving several academic talks on Peruvian Amazonian languages while in Lima. The first two that I have confirmed dates on are both at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), on May 20th and May 22nd. I don’t yet have precise locations for the talks, but I will add that information as soon as I have it. Below I present abstracts for the two talks (with due apologies to the Spanish-speaking peoples of the world). Hope to see some people there!

May 20th, 5:00 pm
La marcación de una categoría flexiva por el orden de palabras: el modo irreal en el idioma iquito (familia zaparoana, Amazonía peruana)

Se sabe que las categorías flexivas de tiempo, aspecto, y modo (TAM) se pueden marcar utilizando diversas estrategias entre las lenguas humanas, inclusive por medio de los afijos, la mutación fonológica, la suplencia léxica y por procesos super-segmentales, como los cambios en los patrones tonales (Anderson 1992, Spencer 1998). En esta ponencia describiré un tipo de marcación de una categoría TAM que no ha sido mencionado hasta el presente en las tipologías de morfología flexiva: la marcación por medio de cambios en el orden de las palabras en una cláusula.

Existe un sistema de marcación de una categoría TAM por medio del orden de palabras en el idioma iquito, un idioma zaparoano de la Amazonía peruana. En este idioma, el modo irreal es marcado por el desplazamiento de elementos post-verbales a la posición entre el sujeto y el verbo, como en (1), donde el elemento /nu/ se desplaza a esta posición. El modo real es marcado por la falta de tal desplazamiento, como en (2).

(1) iina anitáaqui nu ása-qui
DET huangana 3.PRO comer-PERF
`El huangana va a comerlo.’

(2) iina anitáaqui ása-qui nuú.
DET huangana comer-PERF
`El huangana lo comió.’

Muestro que los elementos que desplazan a la ‘posición irreal’ no forman una clase sintáctica coherente, y que los elementos desplazados no son constituyentes sintácticos en todos casos, sino que, a veces son fragmentos de constituyentes. A base de estas observaciones, argumento que el elemento desplazado es un constituyente fonológico (una ‘palabra fonológica’) y que el significado del elemento y sus rasgos sintácticos no son relevantes en marcar el modo irreal. Como tal, el elemento desplazado es semánticamente vacío, y solo sirve como materia fonológica que ocupa la posición irreal.


Anderson, Stephen. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge University Press.

Spencer, Andew. 1998. Morphophonological operations. En Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky (Eds.), The handbook of Morphology. pp. 123-143.

May 22nd, 12:00 noon
La evidencialidad, la pragmática y la responsibilidad: nexos entre la gramática y la vida social en la sociedad Nanti (familia arahuaco, Amazonía peruana)

La evidencialidad ha sido un enfoque importante la para investigaciones sobre la actividad comunicativa como un aspecto de la vida social (Hill & Irvine 1993, Sidnell 2005). Es claro que la evidencialidad es una parte de las prácticas que forman una ‘epistemología cotidiana’ y su investigación ofrece una apertura para entender las maneras en que los recursos gramaticales sirven como instrumentos en la construcción de las relaciones y estructuras sociales a través de la interacción comunicativa.

En esta charla, analizo el uso de recursos evidenciales por los hablantes del Nanti, un idioma arahuaco de la Amazonía peruana, en el contexto de interacciones sociales cotidianos. Muestro que uno de los usos principales de los recursos evidenciales en la sociedad Nanti es para construir representaciones de acontecimientos que disminuyen la responsabilidad del hablante por percances o por situaciones problemáticas. Mi argumento es que la disminución de responsabilidad es un resultado de una ‘metáfora pragmática’ (Silverstein 1976) por lo cual el tipo de relación perceptual indicado por un recurso evidencial corresponde a la intensidad con que el hablante se involucra en un cierto acontecimiento, y por este medio, el recurso indica de manera indirecta la responsibilidad del hablante por la situación.

Este resultado ilustra un aspecto de las funciones sociales y comunicativas de los evidenciales, los cuales han sido un tema de debate entre lingüistas y antropólogo-lingüistas (Aikhenvald 2004). Este resultado también respalda los argumentos de De Haan (1999) y Aikhenvald (2004) quiénes señalan que la evidencialidad es distinta de la modalidad epistémica, aún al nivel de la pragmática.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. Cambridge University Press.

De Haan, Ferdinand. 1999. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics. 18: 83-101.

Hill, Jane and Judith Irvine. 1993. Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse. Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, Jack. 2005. Talk and practical epistemology. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. En Keith Basso and Henry Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. University of New Mexico Press. pp. 11-56

Fabre’s Diccionario etnolingüístico

I recently had a conversation that made me realize that not every single Amazonianist is familiar with Alain Fabre’s on-line Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. Since I have found this to be the single most comprehensive and detailed bibliographic reference work on Amazonian languages currently available I though I should help publicize this resource.

The Diccionario is organized by language family, and within each family, Fabre provides information on genetic classification, numbers of speakers, and their location for each language. The greatest value of this work, however, lies in the incredible thoroughness of its bibliographic references on the languages and societies he covers. Of course, I can only judge the references on languages and language families with which I am familiar, but I have found the coverage to be truly impressive. Fabre has managed to locate both printed works of great obscurity and more recent out-of-the-way digital publications. In addition Fabre updates this work periodically, which means that it has steadily improved over time.

In a recent message, Eduardo Rivail Ribeiro informed me that the site has been updated, redesigned, and has had a great deal of new information and material added to it. For those who are unfamiliar with the site, is devoted to the linguistics of South America, and to a lesser but still significant degree, the ethnography of the region. The focus of the site is very much on Amazonia, and especially Brazilian Amazonia, but I think this simply reflects the center-of-gravity of the interests of those involved with the site.

The site has several very useful pages, including my favorite: a page of links to digital versions of MA and PhD theses on Amazonian languages. There is also a page providing links to open access on-line journals that focus on, or touch on, South American languages. Last, but certainly not least, a link is provided to join the listserve, which I have found very informative and interesting.

Off to Peru

May 12, 2008






Now, back to packing…

Recent research on Aharip, one of the typologically remarkable languages of the Mt. Iso area of Papua New Guinea, has revealed striking evidence in support of recent proposals that a people’s culture can significantly affect the grammar of the language spoken by that people (Everett 2005). In particular, the culture of the Aharip, who live between the 300 and 400 meter isoclines of Mt. Iso, appears to prohibit any direct reference to immediate experience. Instead Aharip culture appears to be governed by a ‘Distant Experience Principle’ (DEP).

The cultural and grammatical consequence of the DEP are wide-ranging, including a tense system that distinguishes only distant future and distant past tenses. One of the most remarkable findings regarding Aharip grammar, however, is the absence of any grammatical structures lacking recursion.

All sentences in Ahirip are minimally biclausal, consisting of a main clause and and a subordinate clause. Concepts that are typically expressable monoclausally in most human languages are expressed in Aharip as subordinate clauses to a large class of speech act verbs, verbs of perception, or verbs of cognition.

Obligatory recursion is also found in possessive constructions. Thus, no expression directly corresponding to ‘my foot’ exists in Aharip, and must instead by expressed by an expression like `my brother’s brother’s foot’. Indeed, it appears that eloquence is Aharip society is measured by a speaker’s ability to employ recursion to create sentences so long that his or her interlocutor loses consciousness before they are complete.

The Aharip numeral system also shows the consequences of the DEP, in that it consists solely of transfinite numbers and infinitesimals.

As far as linguistic anthropologists have been able to determine, all Aharip utterances consist of quotations of creation myths and science fiction novels, the meanings of which are inferred on the basis of culture-specific communicative maxims, including the Maxim of Vast Quantities. This shows that the results reported by Picard et al. are not limited to extra-terrestrial languages, but apply to human ones also.

It is not clear how these results regarding Aharip culture and grammar are related to the previous results linking phonological inventories in Diuwe and Hidbap to altitude, although psychologists speculated that the fact that heavy clouds at the 300 meter isocline block the views of Aharip speakers of everything but distant mountain peaks may have exerted a significant effect on Aharip culture.


Everett, Daniel. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology. 46 (4): 621-646.

Hot off the presses

May 1, 2008

The electrons have not even dried on the PDF of my dissertation — I submitted it and handed in the final lump of paperwork a few hours ago — but you can download it here. Here’s the abstract:

This dissertation examines the strategic deployment of evidential resources in communicative interactions among Nantis, an Arawak people of Peruvian Amazonia. In particular, this work focuses on Nantis’ uses of evidentials to modulate representations of responsibility, and shows that two distinct types of responsibility must be distinguished in order to account for the socially instrumental properties of evidential resources: event responsibility and utterance responsibility. Event responsibility concerns praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for happenings in which the relevant individual is causally implicated; while utterance responsibility concerns the socially salient attributes of an utterance (e.g. truthfulness), and not the utterance’s consequences. Evidential resources are shown to mitigate event responsibility in Nanti interactions by serving as a pragmatic metaphor, whereby the sensory directness or indirectness encoded by evidentials yields inferences regarding individuals’ participation in, and responsibility for, events. The use of evidential resources, principally quotative resources, to modulate utterance responsibility operates on quite different principles. Specifically, quotative resources serve to individuate utterances by attributing them to a particular source, thereby rendering explicit that individual’s commitment to the stances expressed by the quoted utterance. In doing so, the use of the quotative resource emphasizes that individual’s responsibility for the expressed stance. Quotative resources are also employed to decrease a first party’s responsibility for a stance, by attributing it to a third party. In this case, inferences based on the Maxim of Quantity lead interactants to infer reduced commitment on the part of the first party on the basis of the attribution of strong commitment to a third party. Both epistemic stance and a variety of moral and evaluative stances are relevant to utterance responsibility. Significantly, utterance responsibility is one of the few areas in which a pragmatic tie exists between evidentiality and epistemic modality, indicating the relative marginality of epistemic modality to evidentiality in Nanti, even at the level of pragmatics. An ethnographic and historical sketch of the Nanti people is provided, and a grammatical description of the Nanti language is also included.