29.2591, Disc: Review/response to review of 'A Grammar of Kakua'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2591. Tue Jun 19 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2591, Disc: Review/response to review of 'A Grammar of Kakua'

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Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:30:16
From: Patience Epps [pattieepps at austin.utexas.edu]
Subject: Review/response to review of 'A Grammar of Kakua'

 
Read Review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1629.html 

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2365.html

AUTHOR: Katherine Bolaños
TITLE: A Grammar of Kakua
PUBLISHER: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
YEAR: 2016

Review/response to review: “A Grammar of Kakua” by Katherine Bolaños
Patience Epps and Kristine Stenzel

The following discussion of “A Grammar of Kakua” responds to and elaborates on
the review by Richa Srishti, published April 16, 2018 on Linguist List. 

“A Grammar of Kakua”, by Katherine Bolaños, provides a comprehensive
description of the Kakua language, a member of the small Kakua-Nukak family
(formerly known as Máku; see Epps & Bolaños 2017), spoken in the Vaupés region
of the eastern Colombian Amazon. The grammar was prepared as the author’s
doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam and was published in the
LOT dissertations series (Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics /
Landelijke (LOT); http://www.lotpublications.nl/). Bolaños’ work with Kakua
began in 2009 at the University of Texas at Austin, where the author received
her MA degree, and continued at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and at the University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, where she received her PhD in 2016.

This grammar provides the first and only substantial description of Kakua,
which until now has been represented only in a few scant word lists and brief
discussions. Kakua certainly qualifies as an endangered language, despite the
fact that it is still being learned by children – its entire speech community
consists of only about 250 people, most of whom live in two small communities.
Traditionally a semi-nomadic group with a hunting and gathering orientation,
the speakers of Kakua have had relatively limited interaction with the
national society over the years, and only a handful are fluent in Spanish.
Bolaños’s study draws on on a total of 19 months of fieldwork, marked by
significant challenges: the area where the Kakua live is relatively remote;
the setting lacks amenities like electricity and running water; and there was
a dangerous guerrilla presence in the region for the duration of her research.
The grammar is based in a documentary corpus of nearly 70 hours of Kakua
speech, the majority of which is natural discourse. Bolaños’s work has
involved an ongoing and productive collaboration with the Kakua community,
which has included the training and equipping of community members to continue
the documentation of their language and culture into the future.

The thirteen chapters of this work, totaling nearly 400 pages, provide a
comprehensive overview of the grammar of the language, from phonology to
complex clauses. The organization and structure of these chapters follows the
standard expectations of a reference grammar, while also giving appropriate
space to features of particular language-specific importance and interest,
such as noun classification and verb serialization. The description is
accessible, well grounded in contemporary typological research, and
illustrated with copious examples, many of which are drawn from natural
discourse. The work presents a fine example of contemporary best practices in
language documentation and grammar writing.

The Vaupés region is already well known for its highly multilingual character
and for the profound effect that language contact has had on the languages of
the area (see e.g. Sorensen 1967, Aikhenvald 2002, Epps 2007, Stenzel &
Gomez-Imbert 2009, Epps & Stenzel 2013), but until recently little was known
about the involvement of the semi-nomadic ‘forest peoples’ of the region in
this matrix. In addition to the detailed description it provides, Bolaños’s
grammar makes a significant contribution to our understanding of language
contact in the region by addressing the ways in which Kakua grammar resembles
those of its neighbors, and by considering the role that contact-driven change
may have played in bringing about these similarities. The grammar thus adds an
intriguing piece to the puzzle of linguistic diversity and language contact in
the Vaupés region.

Where minor inconsistencies of structure and typos are found, it is worth
noting that the tight schedule of a PhD dissertation submission does not
always allow for the close editing and multiple rounds of revision that are
the norm for books published with major presses. We may hope and expect that
the dissertation version of this already excellent grammar will be followed by
the publication of a revised and updated monograph, accompanied by a set of
glossed texts.

In sum, “A Grammar of Kakua” is an enormously valuable contribution to our
knowledge of an endangered and previously undescribed language, embedded
within a fascinatingly multilingual region.

REFERENCES

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Language Contact in Amazonia. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press.

Epps, Patience. 2007. The Vaupés melting pot: Tucanoan influence on Hup.
Grammars in Contact: A Cross-linguistic Typology, edited by Alexandra
Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon. Explorations in Linguistic Typology 4, pp.
267-289. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Epps, Patience and Katherine Bolaños. 2017. Reconsidering the ‘Makú’ family of
northwest Amazonia. International Journal of American Linguistics
83.3:467-507.

Epps, Patience and Kristine Stenzel (eds.). 2013. Upper Rio Negro: Cultural
and Linguistic Interaction in Northwestern Amazonia. Rio de Janeiro: Museu do
Índio-FUNAI. 597 pp. Ebook available at
http://www.etnolinguistica.org/biblio:epps-stenzel-2013.

Sorensen, Arthur P. Jr. 1967. Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon.
American Anthropologist 69:670-684.

Stenzel, Kristine and Elsa Gomez-Imbert. 2009. Contato linguístico e mudança
linguística no noroeste amazônico: o caso do Kotiria (Wanano) [Language
contact and language change in the northwest Amazon: The case of Kotiria].
Revista da ABRALIN 8:71-100.



Linguistic Field(s): Language Documentation

Subject Language(s): Cacua (cbv)



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