Shiwiar is a language spoken by around 1,200 people in the Amazonian lowlands of eastern Ecuador and northern Peru. It belongs to the Chicham (Jivaroan) language family. This work is the first... Show moreShiwiar is a language spoken by around 1,200 people in the Amazonian lowlands of eastern Ecuador and northern Peru. It belongs to the Chicham (Jivaroan) language family. This work is the first grammatical description of the language, and it is based on a 30-hour audio-visual corpus of natural speech, collected over 12 months of fieldwork between 2011 and 2016 in the Pastaza province of Ecuador.This dissertation is an analysis of Shiwiar phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and information structure. Some of the most salient and typologically interesting phenomena described include the high degree of phonetic and phonological variability in the speech community, a rare type of differential object marking, a rich paradigm of pronominal indexing on the verb, and the extensive use of clause chains as a discursive and clause combining device. This work also engages with the areal and typological literature to shed light on their diachronic development. From a methodological perspective, special emphasis is given throughout this dissertation to the value of using natural language data for linguistic analysis, and the importance of committing to a high standard of transparency and resolvability with regards to the data. Show less
This dissertation contains a new detailed description of Carib grammar and the most extensive inventory of Carib lexemes and affixes so far. It is based on the work of previous researchers and a... Show moreThis dissertation contains a new detailed description of Carib grammar and the most extensive inventory of Carib lexemes and affixes so far. It is based on the work of previous researchers and a decade of field work carried out by the author, mainly in Galibi, a Carib village in eastern Suriname. The Carib language is spoken by some 7000 people living in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil. This book distinguishes four dialects: Venezuelan Carib, Guyanese Carib, western Surinamese Carib, and eastern Surinamese Carib which includes French Guianese and Brazilian Carib. Interesting features of the description are (a) a new phonological analysis, including details on stress and stress patterns, (b) a morphological analysis, including among other things a hitherto undescribed tense/aspect morpheme as well as new explanations of many details, (c) a presentation of five syntactic word units, (d) dozens of pages containing texts with an interlinear morphological analysis and translation, and (e) a dictionary containing information on more than 6500 words. Information about the four dialects has been incorporated in the grammar and dictionary. A new supradialectal orthography is used and suggested as fit for all Carib dialects. Show less
