Discourse Redundancy in Hixkaryana

Abstract

1Hixkaryana is a member of the Carib linguistic family and is spoken by groups located on the Nhamunda and Mapuera rivers in northern Brazil. There are currently about 350 speakers. This presentation is based on data collected on various field trips between 1959 and 1975 as a member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and under a contract between that Institute and the Fundacao Nacional do Indio. Some of the data can be found in Desmond Derbyshire, Textos Hixkaryana, Publicacoes Avulsas no. 3 (Belem: Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, 1965), with some modifications of orthography, spellings, and glosses. This article was prepared as part of a seminar held by the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of North Dakota in the summer of 1976. I am especially indebted to Joseph E. Grimes, who conducted the seminar, for his general guidance and many helpful suggestions. For purposes of this article, the local orthography has been used, and shows some changes compared with that used in D. Derbyshire, Hishkaryana (Carib) Syntax Structure, pts. I and II, IJAL 27 (1961): 125-42 and 226-36. The phonemes are: high vowels e, a, u; low vowels a, o; consonants p, t, tx (alveopalatal affricate), k, b, d, dy (alveopalatal stop), f (bilabial fricative), s, x (alveopalatal fricative), m, n, ny (alveopalatal nasal), r (alveolar flap), ry (alveopalatal flap with lateral release), w, y, h.