Cubeo Grammar (review)

The fifth in the ‘Studies in the languages of Colombia’ series, this is a grammar of the Tucanoan language Cubeo, which has similarities to both Eastern and Western Tucanoan languages. The introduction (1–13) has a short geographic and cultural sketch of the speakers, who live in the border regions of Colombia and Brazil, and a description of the complex phonological system, including some discussion of the morphophonemics. Following this are chapters on the verb, including verb classes, verbal morphology and the use of auxiliaries (15–72); the noun classes, noun phrases and nominal affixes, and clitics (73–122); the other word classes—adjectives, quantifiers, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, and interjections (123–39); clause structure, essentially constituent order and quotes, a very short chapter (141–5); and subordination, with relative clauses and adverbial clauses (pages 147–83). There are also two appendices: The first gives a list of affixes, their glosses and abbreviations, and where they are discussed in the text (185–94) while the second appendix is a short note on the practical orthography (195–6).

Given our rather poor knowledge of South American languages and the interesting data these languages provide for typological and theoretical studies, the appearance of another grammar of a language of the region is always to be celebrated. This grammar is similar to many of the others in the series—comprehensive in the sense of mentioning most areas of the grammar (although discourse features are largely excluded, with a reference given to an earlier paper), plentiful example sentences, but relatively little detailed analysis of some obviously interesting features of the language, with a strong emphasis on the forms of morphemes and constructions.

Some sections of this book are quite difficult to follow, although this often seems to be related to the complexity of the language rather than to a lack of clarity on the part of the authors. In particular, the section on tense, aspect, and evidentiality marking is very dense and could perhaps have been aided by less morphological analysis (which, for example, leads to a profusion of person suffixes occurring under different morphological conditions) or by the addition of full paradigms; as it is, a reader has to search hard to discover which particular form will be used to express a given concept in any particular situation.

There are occasional lapses in description or conflicts between descriptions in different parts of the grammar. For example, on page 110 the case suffixes are introduced as being attached to pronouns and nouns, but then on page 113 it is noted that, at least for one case suffix, it appears on the last element of the noun phrase regardless of category. On page 90, the noun phrase consists minimally of a head noun, which may be modified by an adjective; on page 124, in a discussion of adjectives, comes an aside mentioning that adjectives can be used in headless noun phrases. On page 91 it is claimed that adjectives normally precede the head noun although they may follow under certain discourse conditions, while on page 128(some) adjectives are said to usually follow the noun. And so on. These discrepancies are unfortunate since they lead the reader to wonder, in reading any section, whether somewhere else in the grammar a statement contradicts or modifies what he or she is currently reading.

Overall, it is good to have a relatively complete initial description of another South American language. This book will be useful for scholars working on Tucanoan languages in particular, but also more generally for Americanists and typologists.