Arousing and Mastering Feelings of Alien Inspiration in One's Own Speech: Pragmatics of the Shamanic Songs of the Suruí of Rondônia (Southern Amazonia)

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.