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Vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2008)

Contents

Abstracts

Language Contact along the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
James Cook University

Abstract. The Sepik River Basin in New Guinea is a locus of substantial linguistic diversity, with several genetically related and unrelated languages in continuous contact. The inhabitants of the area divide into “River-dwellers” (i.e., those who live on the Sepik River) and “Jungle-dwellers” (i.e., those who live in the bush). The two groups differ in their ways of subsistence, their knowledge of each other’s languages, and the impact of language contact. This article focuses on Manambu, a language of the Ndu family spoken by a warlike group of River-dwellers, and the ways its grammar has been influenced by the languages of the neighboring Jungle-dwellers, the Kwoma and the Yessan-Mayo. Lexical influence from the closely related Iatmul (also spoken by River-dwellers) is restricted to a number of ritual genres (now obsolete). Patterns of interaction between Jungle-dwellers and River-dwellers and the effects of language contact in the Middle Sepik are compared to the situation in the multilingual Vaupés area in northwest Amazonia. Different means of subsistence, life styles, and patterns of interaction are responsible for differences in contact-induced change in the two cases.

Deictic Selves and Others in Pastaza Quichua Evidential Usage

Janis B. Nuckolls
Brigham Young University

Abstract. This article clarifies the perspectival, deictic nature of evidentiality in Pastaza Quichua, a dialect of Quechua spoken in Amazonian Ecuador. I examine the discourse patterning of what have been called the direct and indirect experience morphemes and argue that a source-based characterization of these morphemes cannot be supported by the data. Using insights from Ilana Mushin’s notion of epistemological stance, I outline the Quechua evidential system, identifying perspectives that may be divided into three main categories: the speaking self of a speech event, the speaking self of a narrated event, and a variety of stances that may categorized by a quality of “otherness.”

Dynamics of Indigenous Language Ideologies in the Colonial Redaction of a Yucatec Maya Cosmological Text

Timothy Knowlton
Berry College

Abstract. Historically, language contact situations engendered in encounters between indigenous societies and European colonialism are markedly asymmetrical. Given the character of existing sources, our understanding of the language ideologies emergent in colonial situations is often restricted to the ideologies of the colonizers. This article provides a counterexample by establishing an intertextual series of different redactions of a Yucatec Maya–language document on cosmological topics transmitted in clandestine copybooks. Changes in use of authorial voice, noun morphology, and reported speech suggest that some literate Maya increasingly correlated language with ethnic identity and sought to address Spanish influence in unofficial documents from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

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