Handbook of Amazonian Languages. Vol. 4 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Handbook of Amazonian languages ed. by Desmond C. Derbyshire, Geoffrey K. Pullum Edward Vajda Handbook of Amazonian languages. Vol. 4. Ed. by Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. ix, 646. This thick book is the first supplement to the Handbook of Amazonian languages (henceforward, HAL) to appear in nearly a decade. Building upon the best tradition of missionary-inspired descriptive linguistic work fostered in connection with Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) activities, editors Desmond Derbyshire and Geoffrey Pullum launched HAL during the mid-1980s as a means of attracting scholarly attention to one of the world’s most persistently ignored linguistic areas. With the appearance of Vol. 4, HAL coverage of the Amazon now increases to three typological studies, four historical-comparative analyses, and ten grammatical descriptions of languages belonging to eight different genetic groupings. Unfortunately, this tally barely begins to approach exhaustive coverage of the region, since the rain forests of South America are home to at least 300 languages divided among about 20 families and two dozen isolates. Nevertheless, given the spate of new publications on Amazonian languages over the past decade, many by linguists with SIL affiliation or who were inspired by exposure to earlier volumes of HAL, the series has clearly achieved the goal of drawing the serious attention of a growing number of linguists to the Amazon. This rapid progress finds clear illustration in the editors’ introduction (3–20), which contains a fairly good overview of the current state of Amazonian linguistics. Before the 1980s, few [End Page 360] Amazonian languages had been described in any detail. Much of this early work had been done by missionaries rather than university linguistics professors, who in many cases were absorbed in debating the latest theoretical formalisms rather than dealing with the exigencies of documenting indigenous languages. Very few serious linguistic articles on the Amazon had yet appeared outside such specialized venues as the International Journal of American Linguistics. More importantly, few linguists at South American universities were actively involved in the documentation or analysis of the region’s indigenous languages. And no Brazilian-born linguist had ever published a monograph on a native Brazilian language. In fact, before the closing years of the twentieth century, the only such book authored by a Brazilian resident was a grammar of Tupinambá (Anchieta 1595), a now extinct Tupí-Guaraní language once widely spoken in coastal Brazil. Sadly, during the ensuing four centuries of near total inactivity, many South American languages vanished unrecorded. The turning point in this unfortunate narrative of scholarly neglect comes during the 1970s, with the appearance of books and articles by D and his SIL colleagues. These include monographs on individual languages such as Hixkaryana (Derbyshire 1979) as well as articles discussing such rare typological features found in the Amazon as object-initial basic word order (Derbyshire 1977). These were followed by the first three volumes of HAL (Derbyshire & Pullum 1986, 1990, 1991), which significantly increased the linguistic data available on the region and for the first time brought together an international collective of linguists, many of whom established a long-term cooperative effort to study the Amazon’s linguistic diversity. During the past decade, this cooperation has produced an accelerating number of publications on Amazonian languages. These include short monographs on two North Arawak languages, the recently extinct Bare (Aikhenvald 1995) and the moribund Tariana (Aikhenvald 1999), as well as an important historical study tracing the evolution of actant agreement typology in Cariban (Gildea 1998). Several other monograph-length studies are now in preparation, some by native-born Brazilian linguists (Seki 2000), others by members of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia), where full-length grammars of Tariana (Aikhenvald, 2000) and Jarawara (Dixon & Vogel, 2000) will soon be completed. A particularly bright point for the future of Amazonian linguistics is the ongoing cooperation between Spike Gildea (University of Oregon) and Denny Moore (Museu Goeldi, Belém) which has already resulted in several Brazilian graduate students initiating work on Amazonian linguistics. Perhaps the most important single publication in the field to date, The Amazonian languages (Dixon & Aikhenvald 1999), is also reported...