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Arousing and Mastering Feelings of Alien Inspiration in One's Own Speech: Pragmatics of the Shamanic Songs of the Suruí of Rondônia (Southern Amazonia)
- Anthropological Linguistics
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2012
- pp. 371-400
- 10.1353/anl.2012.0019
- Article
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This article argues that the spiritual inspiration required, according to the Suruí shamans, to utter their supposedly immutable songs, may be traced back to specific linguistic features of these songs: prominent prosodic structure, syntagmatic structure that follows complex principles, indeterminacy of the reference of some deictic pronouns, and paradoxical use of evidential markers.