A Grammar of Cavineña (review)

The Amazonian lowlands of Bolivia and the neighboring regions of Brazil are home to an intriguingly rich and diverse set of languages, including many isolates and small language families. Many of these languages are highly endangered, and most were, until recently, barely described. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of a remarkable number of high-quality grammars of these languages and others spoken in the wider Amazon region. A Grammar of Cavineña stands out among these as a work of impressive quality and comprehensiveness. A revised version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation (Research Center for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University), the book presents a detailed and thorough description of Cavineña grammar in clear, accessible prose, together with a set of texts and a lexicon.

Cavineña is as yet the only member of the small Tacanan language family of which a comprehensive description has been published. Its approximately twelve hundred speakers are largely bilingual in Spanish, and although children are still learning the language in more rural areas, it faces an uncertain future. This grammar is based on some fifteen months of fieldwork conducted over a period of eight years, and draws from an extensive and diverse corpus of texts.

A particular challenge of grammar writing is to present a language "in its own terms," that is, according to the structural and semantic categories specific to that language, while still making the description accessible to other scholars by relating those categories to crosslinguistically familiar ones. A Grammar of Cavineña does an admirable job of striking this balance. The grammar is divided into twenty chapters that follow broadly the familiar structural template of most reference grammars, spanning phonology, predicate structure, noun phrase structure, and complex clauses. On a more finegrained level, a number of chapters focus on particular structural categories relevant to Cavineña, such as inflectional affixes, Aktionsart suffixes, and phrasal particles. Information is easily retrieved with the help of the book's detailed table of contents, a list of affixes in an appendix, and an index that includes not only categories discussed in the grammar, but also others that are crosslinguistically common but unattested in Cavineña. Moreover, at numerous points in each chapter, comprehensive tables summarize relevant information about particular categories, such as verbal inflectional affixes, postural and directional suffixes, and kinship nouns. Additional tables present the complex combinatory properties of different morphemes and morpheme categories, in an approach that is noteworthy for its clarity and systematicity. The grammar's handling of examples is yet another strength; these are offered in copious illustration of descriptive points, and occur with associated codes so that the particular textual source and its author(s) may be identified (with the help of an extensive table given in chapter 1). The examples are drawn largely from natural discourse and their glosses regularly provide additional discourse context that cannot, for lack of space, be included in the example itself.

The grammar begins with a discussion of Cavineña's social and historical context, together with an overview of the author's fieldwork and text corpus. The author points out that the proposals linking Tacanan languages to the Panoan family (e.g., Key 1968; Girard 1971) are still speculative, and a more definitive assessment must await further information on these languages. Chapters 2 and 3 present Cavineña's phonology and word structure, detailing its system of four vowels, twenty consonants—including a series of alveopalatals—and predominantly (C)V syllable structure. Chapter 4 offers a broad but succinct overview of Cavineña morphosyntax; the book's primary exposition of main clause structure, ergative alignment, and coordination are included in this section, which also gives a general introduction to issues that are treated in more detail in later chapters, such as predicate and noun phrase structure.

Cavineña has a complex predicate structure, of which the eleven structural slots are presented in chapter 4 and described in closer detail in chapter 5. Interestingly...