Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Based on extensive fieldwork in Peru among Ashéninka Perené Arawaks, this study is a preliminary report on ideophone-gesture composites, with special focus on the meaning and functions of ideophone-gesture couplings within participatory learning frameworks. In expert-novice learning environments, ideophone-gesture composites appear to carry a unique cognitive-communicative load by forming scaffolding knowledge structures on the basis of the conventionalized ideophone-gesture inventories. The data are illustrative of Streeck's (2009) vision of the hands' involvement in meaning-making, i.e., that some of the ways in which depictive gestures evoke the world ascend from a basic set of everyday activities of hands in the world, within particular ecological and cultural settings.

The paper reports on the speaker-oriented demonstrative clitics =ka 'near speaker', =ra 'not in the speaker's interactional space', and =nta 'far from the speaker'. It is shown that in situational (deictic) use, the most relevant criteria for the three-way choice are the referent's spatial contiguity to the speaker, touching or direct contact with the referent, pointing with a hand or chin, and eye gaze. Apart from serving as markers of nominal definiteness, the bound forms are found to be used anaphorically, as well as to introduce new participants and mark 'discourse-new-but-hearer-old' information. The bound forms are also used on the syntactic levels of predication and subordination. On the predication level, =ka, =ra, =nta function either as adverbial locality clitics or modal operators, whereas in clause combining the bound forms occur as subordinating temporal or locative conjunctions.

The paper examines a range of conceptual metaphors which serve as key elements of Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) myths and folk tales, and aims at situating them in the context of Amazonian high jungle dwellers' culture. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009-2011 in lowland Peru, the paper gives a brief outline of the current sociolinguistic status of the language, indigenous economy, and aspects of speakers' cultural beliefs. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the discussion of three conceptual metaphors which underlie oral native texts, namely body is animal prey; body is clothing; body is fabrication. Seeking to account for the attested metaphors, the paper concludes with a discussion of indigenous conceptual frameworks of cosmocentric animism and perspectivism.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article is a survey of temporal marking, with emphasis on nominal temporal morphology, in Ashéninka Perené, an Arawak language of the Peruvian Amazon. Specifically, it examines semantic, morphosyntactic and functional properties of nominal TAM and investigates formal and functional distinctions between nominal and verbal temporal systems. It is shown here that Ashéninka Perené exhibits independent (non-propositional) temporal marking expressed by a set of two forms, -ni "ceased existence" and =ranki "temporal precedence", "change of state", and "absent in the speaker's environment at the present moment". The study has revealed that the temporal markers can be each used in the same clause to mark independent nominal and propositional verbal TAM.

This study offers an on-the-ground perspective on the multi-layered process of the Ashéninka and Asháninka state-initiated standardization reform, with the Upper Perené Ashéninka of Peru being a case in point. The reform is carried out in the context of the dramatic decline in the Ashéninka Perené language use due to the community-wide shift to the national language, Spanish. Presented within the ethnographic framework, the analysis focuses on the community's own view of the national language policy, revealed in the speakers' language allegiances and attitudes to its own language and literacy, and that of the competing Tambo Asháninka variety, chosen by the government actors to be the written standard. On the basis of a comprehensive video and audio corpus, the ethnography considers conflictive discursive histories of the policy-makers including those of language consultants, bilingual teachers, tribal and political leadership and educational policy agents. The on-the-ground implementation of the standardization reform is supported by the younger generation of speakers who generally have a passive knowledge of the Upper Perené language. Older policy-makers, organized into a language consultant team, have launched resistance projects including the production of Upper Perené books and dictionaries which use the language community's own spelling conventions.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of landscape terms in an Amazonian Arawak language of Peru, this study examines landscape categorization among the Alto Perené Kampa. It is shown that Alto Perené culture-specific themes of ecological categorization, namely substance and shape, form a covert template of semantic generalizations that structure the landscape vocabulary set. The continuous semantic strands of landscape terms are substance and shape of geomorphic features, either expressed by simplex terms or combinations of simplex terms with various classifiers. The comprehensive hydrological and topographic vocabulary is argued to reflect Alto Perené Arawaks’ particular concern with the affordances of the surrounding landscape and their spiritual preoccupations.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines linguistic resources used for coding agreements in Alto Perené (Arawak) conversation. The study draws on the anthropological tradition of conversation analysis-informed ethnographies. The investigation of agreeing responses is limited to those which allow a projectedly 'knowing', or K-plus, participant to raise his or her epistemic status from the sequentially second position. It is shown that Alto Perené K-plus response formats include the evaluative property word kametsari 'good' with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari 'it is the case' and omapero 'it is true', and the verb ñakiro 'as you can see'. This analysis demonstrates a relationship between the Alto Perené practices of expressing K-plus agreements and the collateral effects arising from the particular meanings and functions of structures which are used for accomplishing an agreeing action.

Abstract: This paper proposes a practical orthography for Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) by looking at the existing orthographies of the language. Focusing on the SIL-recommended linguistic orthography, native language consultants' ad hoc writing samples, and the ...

ABSTRACT This research is a first attempt to survey ideophones in the Amazonian Arawak language Alto Perené (a.k.a. Ashéninka Perené). Based on fieldwork data, this study shows that ideophones constitute a separate class of words in Alto Perené in view of their distinctive phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. The study also draws on primary and secondary data from three other genetically related neighboring language varieties (Ashéninka Pichis, Asháninka Tambo-Ene, and Kakinte) to demonstrate a moderate degree of interdialect variation. The study suggests the possibility that the following properties may be regional affinities: non-canonical stress assignment; word class-specific reduplication of the word-final syllabic segments -ri, -re, -ro, -pi, -po expressing spatial distribution, intensity, or repeated/durative/open-ended temporal structure of the reported event; productive (V)k-suffixation contributing to the expression of punctual/perfective aspect; syntactic functions of appositional or coordinated predicate, co-verb, complement, and adverb; prevalence of Gestalt packaging of sensory events; a dearth of ideophones describing states.

Recent typological studies of clausal negation not only focus on the basic standard negation strategies that languages use to negate declarative verbal main clauses but also discuss typol- ogy of asymmetric negation in declaratives. Asymmetric negatives may have anges in the form of the lexical verb, tense and aspect marking or other clausal modifications while sym- metric negatives differ from the affirmatives only due to the addition of (a) negative marker(s). Here it is shown that asymmetric negatives in Mea (Narrow Grassfields Bantu), similar to a majority of other languages, include modifications of the perfective forms; symmetric negative constructions are prevalent, another cross-linguistically common phenomenon in negation. is paper supports findings of cross-linguistic studies on negation by showing that Mea extends its standard negation strategy to other environments su as subordinate, existential, locative, possessive, and non-verbal clauses but uses non-standard neg...

This study examines the interaction of contrastive focus-marking with nominalization in bisected contrastive focus constructions of Alto Perené, a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. It also investigates morphosyntactic means of contrastive focus-marking in two neighboring Kampa languages, Ashéninka Pichis and Ashaninka Tambo. The languages are shown to employ various focus-marking strategies. The Alto Perené polar (truth value) focus construction shows a preference for nominalizing a lexical verb. In Ashaninka Tambo, the expression of polar and modal operator focus (the latter attested in negated clauses) does not require nominalization of the lexical verb, but in clefted content and polar questions and airmative declarative clauses, nominalization is mandatory for the purpose of argument focusing. In Ashéninka Pichis, the argument focus-marking strategies include the syntactic movement of the focus constituent to the preverbal focus position and either an elision of the subject index on the verb, or inflecting the verb for stative aspect.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the research community, the book is a focused exploration of discourse patterns of Alto Perené Arawak, with emphasis on conversational structures. The book’s methodological
scaffold is based on proposals and insights from multiple research fields, such as comparative conversation analysis, sociology, interactional linguistics, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and prosodic typology. The interactional patterns of a small Arawak language of Peru are shown to share the common infrastructure reported in the organization of conversation across other languages and cultures. Yet the analysis demonstrates a variety of unique nuances in the organization of interactional behavior of Alto Perené Arawak participants. The peculiarities observed are attributed to the language-specific semiotic resources and participants’ orientation to the local cultural norms.