This book offers a comprehensive description of Kukama-Kukamiria, spoken by about 1000 elders in the Peruvian Amazon. The empirical basis for the grammar is fifteen years of fieldwork, including text data from 36 fluent speakers. Seventeen chapters deal with phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse phenomena. Salient typological features include a robust morphological distinction between male and female speech; the expression of TAM categories via fixed clitics; the encoding of three-place predicates by means of transitive clauses; six directive constructions that distinguish degrees of pragmatic force; and multiple types of purpose clauses that differ in terms of coreference control. This grammar also shows the Tupí-Guarani origin of an important number of Kukama-Kukamiria grammatical structures and advances comparative studies in the region.
Rosa Vallejos, Ph.D. (2010), University of Oregon, is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. She has published articles and chapters on Kukama-Kukamiria (Tupían), Secoya (Tukanoan) and Amazonian Spanish, and the Diccionario kukama-kukamiria/castellano (2015).
University libraries with studies on Amerindian Languages or Latin America. Linguists working on typology. Linguists, archeologists, anthropologists, and other scholars interested in Amazonian languages and cultures.