Tukanoan languages

The Upper Rio Negro region is remarkable not only for its high linguistic and ethnic diversity, but also for the history of multilingualism and cultural interchange that have brought its peoples together. The fourteen chapters of this volume investigate this interaction, drawing on the insights provided by the languages and cultures of the region, and exploring how the Upper Rio Negro profile has been shaped by forces promoting both similarity and difference. The collection draws on the growing dialogue between linguists and anthropologists, and emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to questions that involve both language and culture.

Companion volume to Alto Xingu, uma Sociedade Multilíngue (Franchetto, 2011), both available for download on the Museunacional link.

This article describes the evolution of past/perfective subject-verb agreement morphology in the Tukanoan family, reconstructing relevant aspects of Proto-Tukanoan verbal morphology and delineating the subsequent diachronic development of verbal subject agreement morphology in the Eastern branch of the family. We argue that suffixes that cumulatively expone past/perfective and person, number, and gender (png) subject agreement resulted from the fusion of post-verbal demonstratives/pronouns expressing png information with suffixes expressing past/perfective tam information. We propose that different png agreement categories developed at successive stages in the diversification of the family, with third person masculine singular subject agreement emerging before other png categories, followed by animate plural agreement, then finally by the development of third person feminine agreement. The result in Eastern Tukanoan was a cross-linguistically unusual agreement system that contrasts four agreement categories: (i) first and second person singular and third person inanimate (singular and plural); (ii) third person animate masculine singular; (iii) third person animate feminine singular; and (iv) third animate plural.

Contact linguistics has gained many insights from South American contact studies, and notably those dealing with contact between Arawak and Tukanoan families. Aikhenvald (2002) gives a first look into the contact between Yukuna (YUK, Arawak) and Tanimuka/Retuarã (TAN, two very close dialects of a Tukanoan language). The two languages are said to have mutually adapted to each other at the phonological and grammatical levels, due to close contact in the past (Aikhenvald 2012). This situation is contrasted with the multilateral diffusion observed in the Vaupés area, known for its linguistic exogamy (Aikhenvald 2002, Epps 2007). The present paper assesses and revises Aikhenvald’s claims about the YUK-TAN contact situation, on the basis of recent descriptions based on primary fieldwork data (Eraso 2015, Lemus Serrano 2016, Robayo to appear).
Our first point concerns the social context: YUK and TAN are in fact still in close contact. They participate in an ethnic exogamic system, resulting in extensive bilingualism. Moreover, YUK is recently gaining prestige over TAN. This context does not differ as much as previously thought from the Vaupés context.
Second, we consider the YUK-TAN contact within a broader areal perspective. Several similarities between these languages are present in other Arawak and Tukanoan languages, as cases of Pan-Arawak-Tukanoan homologies. On another level, other YUK-TAN similarities are shared with other languages in the Northwest Amazon, including non-Tukanoan or non-Arawak languages, as part of broad Northwestern Amazonian homologies.
Last but not least, we identify bilateral homologies between Yukuna and Tanimuka, in addition to Aikhenvald’s (2002) original features, in three different domains.
1) Lexicon. A few words from basic and cultural vocabulary are uniquely shared by TAN and YUK, such as ‘parrot’ TAN pakoroka & YUK pakoro. Several words shared by TAN and YUK are also present in many Arawakan languages, indicating borrowings in TAN from YUK, such as ‘fog’ YUK isamani ~ ihamani & TAN ihamarãka & Piapoco and Achagua (Arawak) samana. Yet borrowing in YUK from TAN is also attested as in ‘paddle’ YUK weʔetʃi & TAN wẽaripãia.
2) Grammatical morphemes. Three grammatical morphemes have likely been borrowed in TAN from YUK. TAN has a case marker rika ‘genitive’ not shared by other Tukanoan languages. In YUK rika is a free 3rd person non-feminine pronoun, which might have evolved in TAN as a genitive from a juxtapositive construction. A second case of borrowing is the causative suffix -ta in YUK and the homologue causative in TAN -ta; cognate morphemes are found in other Arawak languages, but not in Tukanoan languages. The third case is the TAN ĩmã copula verb used in attributive constructions. YUK has an existential verb iʔima ~ iʔimi and in Baniwa (Arawak) a copula verb is eema. 
3) Prosody. Comparison of word-level prosody in YUK and TAN is made difficult by the lack of a clear prosodic profile of the Arawak family. Nevertheless, we suggest that there has been some convergence between the two prosodic systems. Despite their disparities (two-tone system in TAN, phonemic stress in YUK), both languages show a systematic stress/tone polarity between root and affixes, which is not found in other related languages.
To conclude, we provide additional elements and new perspectives regarding  Aikhenvald’s (2002) original analysis of the YUK-TAN contact situation. Direct borrowings of lexical and grammatical morphemes not only suggest that YUK is dominant in the contact scenario, but also that language contact sustained by exogamy in the region is not immune to the direct transfer of morphemes (pace the situation of Kubeo and Baniwa (Chacon 2013)).

This study has two aims. First, it lays out the synchronic patterning of four constructions that express static location in Secoya (Tukanoan). Each construction licenses different semantic verb types: topological verbs, postural verbs, an existential verb, and a copula. Second, this study explores the different construals encoded by these constructions and highlights the ways speakers use them creatively to elaborate on stage-level properties adjacent to location in locative utterances. Data collected from six speakers using visual stimuli reveal that each of the constructions elaborates on specific aspects of locative scenes. Responses for typical/atypical scenes, negative polarity statements, and frequency patterns show that speakers can choose conceptualizations that favor Ground geometry, Figure posture, more complex Figure dispositions, or marked perspectivizations. Similar phenomena are observed in other Amazonian languages. These results raise difficulties in identifying a basic locative construction, suggesting that Secoya may not fit squarely into any type in existing typologies of spatial expression (e.g., Ameka and Levinson 2007). Additionally, the Secoya system raises questions about the relationship between conceptual alternativity and the notion of “basicness” with respect to construal types.

This narrative tells of an episode in the personal life of Tomás Nogueira, a speaker of Wa’ikhana (or Piratapuyo, East Tukano family), a highly endangered and still little described language. The Wa’ikhana people live in northwest Amazonia, in villages in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Lands (Brazil) and neighboring Departamento de Vaupés (Colombia). Tomás’s tale presents us a good-humored account of a day when his hunting plans went wrong. Besides full interlinear analysis of the narrative, we off er background information about the Wa’ikhana people and a brief typological profile of the language, highlighting salient grammatical structures that can be observed throughout the narrative.

RESUMO Esta narrativa relata uma experiência pessoal de um falante de wa'ikhana (ou piratapuyo, família tukano oriental), língua ainda pouco descrita e altamente ameaçada. Os Wa'ikhana vivem no noroeste amazônico, em comunidades da TI Alto Rio Negro (Brasil) e no Departamento de Vaupés (Colômbia). A narrativa relata de forma bem-humorada um episódio na vida do narrador, Tomás Nogueira, sobre um dia de caçaria que não deu certo. Além da análise interlinear completa da narrativa, oferecemos informações sobre do povo wa'ikhana e um perfi l tipológico da língua, destacando características estruturais salientes que se apresentam ao longo da narrativa.

This is a narrative account of animal transformation and cyclic abundance told by the Kotiria (Wanano), members of the Eastern Tukanoan language family in Brazil and Colombia.  It recounts the annual event when, accompanied by the rising waters and the appearance of the Jaguar constellation (Yai) in the sky, flocks of birds descend
from the sky and dive into the river where they transform into
fish.