A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar (Chicham)

Description

The main goal of this dissertation is to provide a description and analysis of all major areas of linguistic structure in Shiwiar. This is motivated by the fact that previous academic work on the Shiwiar language is limited to a small dictionary, a collection of songs, a BA thesis on possession and two anthropological treatises about the emergence of the Shiwiar nation. There is no previous comprehensive account of the grammar of Shiwiar. This work is based on a 30-hour audio-visual documentary corpus of natural speech data. Although no grammatical description can be fully representative of a language, an important aim of this work is to reflect as accurately as possible the way that the Shiwiar language is used on a day-today basis by its speakers. For this reason, the grammatical analysis that follows is heavily reliant on spontaneous and naturalistic speech data, and it is informed by the pragmatic, interactional and social context that it was uttered in. All the claims in this grammar will be fully resolvable to the primary data (see §1.5). The Amazon basin is home to an incredibly high density of languages and language families. Although little is understood about the historical processes that led to this staggering diversity, it is clear that both long-term language maintenance and intense contact between language communities have had profound effects (Epps & Michael 2017). Another goal of this dissertation is to engage with the growing body of Amazonian areal literature to help unravel the processes of maintenance and contact that have shaped the languages of the region. Wherever relevant, I will highlight possible instances of contact-induced change and I will note salient similarities and differences between Shiwiar and neighbouring Amazonian languages. With this dissertation, grammatical descriptions now exist for every member of the Chicham language family, including two comprehensive reference grammars published in the last few years on Aguaruna (Overall 2017a) and Wampis (Peña 2015). This makes the Chicham language family one of the most broadly researched genetic units in the Amazon basin. I will point out areas of Shiwiar grammar that shed light on the diachronic development of Chicham languages and, although it is beyond the scope of this work to focus entirely on diachrony, I hope that this grammatical description will help pave the way for an eventual reconstruction of ProtoChicham.