Lev Michael

The Nanti reality status system: Implications for the typological validity of the realis/irrealis contrast

Abstract This article describes the reality status system of Nanti (Arawak) and argues that it constitutes an instance of a canonical reality status system. The relevance of such a system is examined in the light of literature that casts doubt on the typological validity of reality status as crosslinguistic grammatical category. It is shown that reality status is an obligatory inflectional category in Nanti, and that the distribution of realis and irrealis marking across Nanti construction types hews closely to expectations based on notional understandings of “realis” and “irrealis” categories grounded in a contrast between “realized” and “un-realized” situations. It is also shown that the Nanti reality status system does not exhibit evidence of being based, either synchronically or diachronically, on semantically narrower notions that could account for the distribution of reality status marking in the language, without recourse to the more generalized notions of realized and unrealized events. It is suggested that the Nanti reality status system might serve as a suitable canonical system around which a canonical typology of reality status might be built.

Negation in Arawak Languages

v To Christian, Zoe, and Isabella and To Chris (notasanotakempi) and To the speakers of Arawak languages, whose patience, dedication, and hard work with linguists from around the world have made this volume possible

On the Pre-Columbian origin of Proto-Omagua-Kokama

Cabral (1995, 2007, 2011) and Cabral and Rodrigues (2003) established that Kokama and Omagua, closely-related indigenous languages spoken in Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonia, emerged as the result of intense language contact between speakers of a Tupi-Guarani language and speakers of non-Tupi-Guarani languages. Cabral (1995, 2007) further argued that the language contact which led to the development of Kokama and Omagua transpired in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in the Jesuit mission settlements located in the provincia de Maynas (corresponding roughly to modern northern Peruvian Amazonia). In this paper I argue that Omagua and Kokama were not the product of colonial-era language contact, but were rather the outcome of language contact in the pre-Columbian period. I show that a close examination of 17th and 18th century missionary chronicles, Jesuit texts written in Omagua and Kokama, and modern data on these languages, make it clear that Omagua and Kokama already existed in a form similar to their modern forms by the time European missionaries arrived in Maynas in the 17th century. Moreover, I show that several key claims regarding ethnic mixing and Jesuit language policy that Cabral adduces in favor of a colonial-era origin for Kokama are not supported by the available historical materials. Ruling out a colonial-era origin for Omagua and Kokama, I conclude that Proto-Omagua-Kokama, the parent language from which Omagua and Kokama derive, was a pre-Columbian contact language.

Exploring phonological areality in the circum-Andean region using a Naive Bayes Classifier

This paper describes the Core and Periphery technique, a quantitative method for exploring areality that uses a naive Bayes classifier, a statistical tool for inferring class membership based on training sets assembled from members of those classes. The Core and Periphery technique is applied to the exploration of phonological areality in the Andes and surrounding lowland regions, based on the South American Phonological Inventory database (SAPhon 1.1.3; Michael, Stark, and Chang 2013). Evidence is found for a phonological area centering on the Andean highlands, and extending to parts of the northern and central Andean foothills regions, the Chaco, and Patagonia. Evidence is also found for Southern and North-Central phonological sub-areas within this larger phonological area.

A Typological and Comparative Perspective on Negation in Arawak Languages

This chapter presents a typological and comparative overview of negation in Arawak languages, focusing on standard negation, prohibitive constructions, and reflexes of the Proto-Arawak privative *ma-. This overview draws on the eight language-specific studies in this volume, as well as published sources on 19 other Arawak languages. These languages are typologized in terms of the structural characteristics of their negation systems, and in terms of Miestamo’s (2005) influential notion of paradigmatic and structural (a)symmetries between negated main clauses and their affirmative counterparts. Prohibitive constructions are typologized on the basis of Van de Auwera and Lejeune (2005), which distinguishes constructions based on whether negation is expressed in the same manner as in standard negation constructions, and whether mood is expressed in the same manner as in imperatives. The comparative overview examines reflexes of the Proto-Arawak privative, and suggests that this element originally derived privative stative predicates from nouns, and that it subsequently acquired additional functions, including subordinate negation, stative predicate negation, and in a restricted set of languages, standard negation. Also noted are the similarities between the properties of negation systems in Arawak languages that exhibit negative auxiliaries, and those that exhibit interactions between negation particles and reality status inflection.

A Relaxed Admixture Model of Language Contact

Under conditions of language contact, a language may gain features from its neighbors that it is unlikely to have gained endogenously. We describe a method for evaluating pairs of languages for potential contact by comparing a null hypothesis, in which a target language obtained all its features by inheritance, with an alternative hypothesis in which the target language obtained its features via inheritance and via contact with a proposed donor language. Under the alternative hypothesis, the donor may influence the target to gain features, but not to lose features. When applied to a database of phonological characters in South American languages, this method proves useful for detecting the effects of relatively mild and recent contact, and for highlighting several potential linguistic areas in South America.

A sketch of muniche segmental and prosodic phonology

This paper presents a description of the segmental and prosodic phonology of Muniche, a critically endangered Peruvian Amazonian isolate. Using data from team-based fieldwork with a group of rememberers of Muniche, this paper describes the segmental inventory, syllable structure, and stress system of the language, plus a number of prosodically motivated epenthetic processes. A historical overview of the language and its contact with neighboring Kawapanan languages is also presented. Finally, the results of this study are compared with Gibson (1996), the sole previous study of Muniche phonology. [Keywords: Muniche, Amazonia, endangered language, language shift]

Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: Reality status in Iquito

Abstract Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation. Realis clauses exhibit a construction in which no element intervenes between the subject and verb, while in irrealis clauses a phrasal constituent appears between the subject and verb. No free or bound morphology otherwise indicates whether an Iquito clause is realis or irrealis. Based on these facts and partially similar phenomena in other languages, this article argues that typologies of inflectional exponence should be expanded to include word order as an inflectional formative.

Negation in Nanti

This chapter describes standard and non-standard negation constructions in Nanti, a language of the Kampan branch of the Arawak family, focusing on the interaction between negation and reality status inflection in the language. Nanti exhibits a three-way constructional distinction between affirmative realis clauses, irrealis negated clauses, and ‘doubly irrealis’ clauses, which exhibit two irrealis parameters: negation and a parameter such as future temporal reference or conditional modality. Forms of main clause non-standard negation described include metalinguistic negation, existential negation, and ‘exhaustive’ negation. Negation in clause-linking constructions such as conditional, counterfactual, and purposive constructions is also described. Main clause negation construction types are typologized in terms of the paradigmatic and constructional (a)symmetries they exhibit: interaction between negation and reality status marking entails that standard negation is paradigmatically asymmetric, but this is not the case for metalinguistic negation, which does not affect reality status marking. Similarly, standard negation exhibits an aspectual neutralization symmetry, which metalinguistic negation lacks. Also discussed are reflexes in Nanti of the Proto-Arawak privative prefix *ma-, which are found only frozen as parts of verbal roots, and possibly, as part of the metalinguistic and existential negation particles.