Current Studies on South American Languages (review)

This volume consists of a selection of presentations given during two symposia on the indigenous languages of South America at two events held in the year 2000: the 50th International Congress of Americanists in Warsaw (Poland) and the 3rd Workshop on Amerindian Languages in Leiden (The Netherlands). Over thirty languages from a large number of families and isolated stocks are discussed. Most of these languages are spoken in the Amazon basin, some are spoken in the region of the eastern foothills of the Andes, and a few are from the Andes region itself. A fair number of these languages are genetic isolates from Bolivia. The areas of focus are sociolinguistics and history of the field, phonology and phonetics, and morphosyntax. The volume includes nineteen papers in either English or Spanish, except for one article written in German and English and another in French.

With regard to the papers on sociolinguistics and history of the field, Wolf Dietrich presents the development of a linguistic atlas of the areas in which Guaraní Criollo is in contact with Spanish and Portuguese. Sieglinde Falkinger discusses the differences between male and female language use in Chiquitano (Besiro). In turn, both Utta von Gleich and Mily Crevels focus on Bolivia, on the use of literacy among bilinguals and on language death, respectively. Finally, Rotger Snethlage gives an overview of the scientific career of his father, Emil Heinrich Snethlage.

Four papers focus on phonology and phonetics. Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus analyzes certain morphophonological processes in Cholón. Ester Herrera discusses the phonetic correlates of some phonological features of the Chamí dialect of Emberá. Lastly, Emilio Mosonyi and Pedro Viegas Barros focus the suprasegmental features of the Baniwa language and the reconstruction of the Proto-Mataguayo dorsal consonants, respectively.

Several contributors discuss various topics within morphosyntax. These include papers on personal pronouns and grammatical relations in Cashinahua/ Kashinawa, a Panoan language (Eliane Camargo); the typological features of the Kamsá language from an areal perspective (Alain Fabre); the person hierarchy in Aymara (Elena Filimonova); the productive nominal classification system of Movina, an unclassified language of the Amazonian lowlands of Bolivia (Colette Grinevald); a semantic characterization of the different suffixes that are used in Leko, an unclassified language of the Andean foothills region of Bolivia, to form complex verbal expressions (Simon van de Kerke); a comparison of the pronominal and demonstrative system of the Cariban languages, in an attempt to provide a preliminary reconstruction of the Proto-Cariban system (Sérgio Meira); the semantic values of a specific past tense in Kali’na (also known as Cariña, Galibi, or Carib), marked by the suffix -i (Odile Renault-Lescure); gender agreement in Mosetén, an unclassified language of the Andean foothills region of Bolivia (Jeanette Sakel); modal derivational suffixes in Kwaza, an unclassified Amazonian language of Rondônia, Brazil (Hein van der Voort); and the characteristics and functions of applicative affixes in a number of Amazonian languages spoken in Peru (Mary Ruth Wise).

The volume is particularly interesting because the majority of the contributions relate to research that is the direct result of linguistic fieldwork by the authors. It is a welcome contribution to the research of these endangered languages.