Schedule 74. StuTS

Our talk presents original research on Andoke, an isolate from the Colombian Amazon, in which we discuss the development of the plural marker -siʌ́hʌ.

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

Andoke is a highly endangered language isolate spoken by some 30 speakers in the Southern Colombian Amazon. Forming part of the Caquetá-Putumayo cultural area (Echeverri 1997), Andoke maintains intense contact with other languages and cultures of the area, yielding relative cultural and possibly structural linguistic homogeneity (e.g. Wojtylak 2018). The language had received relatively little attention until the 1970s, with anthropologist Jon Landaburu first providing a comprehensive grammatical description of Andoke (Landaburu 1979) and more research being conducted by Landaburu ever since (e.g. Landaburu 1992, 2000, 2023). Until now, research on Andoke has suggested that the language is hardly using any nominal plural marking. Landaburu (1979: 323, in passim) provides examples of a bound classifier -siʌ́hʌ evoking the notion of “plurality and collectivity”, only being used on animate nouns. This morpheme is glossed as “group” by Landaburu and does not seem to be an obligatory, dedicated plural marker; it rather appears to be primarily used in ethnonymic compounds (“people”) or in appositional noun constructions. Our research, based on both reviewing secondary literature, and conducting original fieldwork in-person as well as remotely, paints a different picture of this morpheme, which will be presented in this talk. Analyzing our data, -siʌ́hʌ does not behave like a bound classifier occurring only with animates, but now seems to be a general plural marker, also appearing with inanimate nouns. The primary research question attached to this talk relates to the conundrum of language change versus descriptive bias: did -siʌ́hʌ grammaticalize, or did Landaburu, as the sole researcher working on Andoke at the time, misrepresent the element and its distribution?

References:

Echeverri, J. A. (1997). The people of the center of the world: a study in culture, history, and orality in the Colombian Amazon. New School for Social Research.
Landaburu, J. (1979). La langue des Andoke (Amazonie colombienne): grammaire.
Landaburu, J. (1992). La predicación en lengua andoque y parámetros de utilidad para una tipología de la predicación. In Memorias del II Congreso del CCELA, 155-171. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, CCELA.
Landaburu, J. (2000). La Lengua Andoque. In González de Pérez, María Stella and Rodríguez de Montes, María Luisa (eds.), Lenguas indígenas de Colombia: una visión descriptiva, 275-288. Santafé de Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Landaburu, J. (2023). Andoke. In Epps, Patience and Michael, Lev (eds.), Language Isolates I: Aikanã to Kandozi- Shapra, 125-172. Berlin: Mouton.
Wojtylak, K. (2018). Language contact in Caquetá and Putumayo river basins in Northwest Amazonia.

Info

Day: 2023-10-28
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 2
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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