A Grammar of Aguaruna (Iiniá Chicham) (Mouton Grammar Library, 68)

This book is a descriptive grammar of Aguaruna, known to its speakers as Iiniá Chicham, a Jivaroan language spoken by some 55, 000 people in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. Aguaruna is typologically and historically significant because of its location in the eastern foothills of the Andes, right between the Andean and Amazonian linguistic areas. Some typologically unusual syntactic phenomena, for example in the areas of grammatical relations and case marking, make this description relevant beyond the areal context. This is the first full grammar of a Jivaroan language, covering phonology, morphology and syntax as well as addressing some issues in discourse structure. It is an important work for specialists in South American languages as well as for linguists working in more general typological fields. Acknowledgements 7 Table of contents 9 Abbreviations and conventions 19 Maps 25 1 Introduction to the Aguaruna language 27 2 Cultural and historical context 47 3 Phonology 65 4 Morphology of nouns, adjectives and pronouns 153 5 The noun phrase 231 6 The verb 259 7 Grammatical relations and transitivity 293 8 Tense, aspect and person in finite verbs 349 9 Mood and modality 397 10 Questions 411 11 Negation 429 12 Adverbial words 437 13 Subordinate clauses 461 14 Clause chaining and clause combining 509 15 Nominalization 529 16 Relative clauses 569 17 Speech reports and complement clauses 579 18 Discourse organization 603 Text 1: A man is eaten by a boa 621 Text 2: Extracts from Pablo’s autobiography 632 Text 3: Hunting 641 References 647 Index 655 The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only cri