In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Grammar of Hup
  • Frank Seifart
A Grammar of Hup. Patience Epps. Mouton Grammar Library 43. With accompanying CD-ROM. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. xxiii + 983. $237.00, €148.00 (cloth).

This comprehensive grammar of the Hup language, spoken in the Brazil-Colombia frontier region in northwestern Amazonia, is a highly valuable contribution to the growing number of descriptions of Amazonian languages, as well as to typologically oriented grammars of hitherto undescribed or underdescribed languages in general. It is a revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation, for which she received the prestigious Pāṇini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology (Mithun 2008). The grammar is written in a clear and accessible style throughout, avoiding obscure terms and introducing basic features early on, achieving a text that is coherent and easy to read.

The grammar is clearly structured into eighteen chapters, and includes a detailed table of contents, an author index, and a subject index, making it easy to locate relevant information. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the Hup language and its speakers, chapter 2 deals with phonology, and chapter 3 with general morphological characteristics. Chapters 4–7 describe nouns, nominal morphology, and noun phrases. The complex structure of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are dealt with in chapters 8–15. Finally, there are chapters on negation (chapter 16), the structure of simple clauses (chapter 17), and clause combining (chapter 18).

With over one thousand pages, the author presents an enormous amount of information on the Hup language, making it now probably the best-described language of the region. But the grammar does not stop there: it discusses this information from typological, cultural, areal, and historical-comparative perspectives, placing the description in broader, theoretically interesting contexts, and providing explanations for unusual patterns. Many of these discussions are contained in “comparative notes” and “historical notes” that are interspersed in the text (and would have been well worth mentioning in the table of contents or in a separate list). Given the breath of coverage, only a small selection of topics can be mentioned here.

Based on a critical review of existing hypotheses about the genetic affiliation of Hup and the analyses of new data, Epps confirms the genetic link between Hup, Nadëb, Dâw, and Yuhup. Epps proposes to name this family “Nadahup” and to avoid “Makú,” which has been used by linguists to refer to a number of different groupings (including Nadahup) and is considered by indigenous people to be an ethnic slur. For these reasons, it is hoped that this new term will catch on, despite the known difficulty of changing such labels. Epps goes on to convincingly show that the previously suggested inclusion of Puinave and the Kakua-Nukak languages in the Nadahup family is unfounded (see also Girón Higuita 2008:419–39). This lays to rest hypotheses launched about a hundred years ago based on incomplete data (Koch-Grünberg 1906; Rivet and Tastevin 1920) that had been cited in numerous places.

Throughout the book, Epps puts due emphasis on the importance of the cultural context of Hup to explain certain linguistic facts. The approximately fifteen hundred Hup are a seminomadic people relying more on hunting and gathering than on agriculture. They have a subordinate position within the regional ethnic hierarchy, in particular vis-à- vis Tukano-speaking agriculturalist “River Indians,” with whom they maintain close [End Page 176] socioeconomic relations. Hup is still acquired by virtually all children as a first language; among adults, there is a high degree of bilingualism in Tukano. Like neighboring groups, the Hup have a strong sense of language as a marker of ethnic identity. This explains why there are surprisingly few lexical loans despite heavy areal influence with respect to structures and sometimes individual categories. Areally diffused features of Hup include, for example, nominal classification, evidentiality, and morphemic nasality.

Phonology is treated as a stepchild in many grammars, but certainly not in this one. The description of the complex phonology of Hup is thorough and supported by phonetic analyses, illustrated in waveforms, pitch graphs, and spectograms. There is a limited, two-way tone system, realized on syllables bearing primary stress...

pdf