Conversational Structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru

Description

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the research community, the book is a focused exploration of discourse patterns of Alto Perené Arawak, with emphasis on conversational structures. The book's methodological scaffold is based on proposals and insights from multiple research fields, such as comparative conversation analysis, sociology, interactional linguistics, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and prosodic typology. The interactional patterns of a small Arawak language of Peru are shown to share the common infrastructure reported in the organization of conversation across other languages and cultures. Yet the analysis demonstrates a variety of unique nuances in the organization of interactional behavior of Alto Perené Arawak participants. The peculiarities observed are attributed to the language-specific semiotic resources and participants'orientation to the local cultural norms. The book's structured examination of conversational data of a small indigenous language of South America is anticipated to be of utility to linguistic research on understudied non-Western languages. Conversational structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru Editorial page Title page LCC data Dedication page Table of contents List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Preliminaries 1.1 Objectives and significance 1.2 Scope and organization 1.3 Theoretical scaffolding 1.3.1 Goffman 1.3.2 Garfinkel 1.3.3 Conversation analysis 1.3.4 Linguistic tradition 1.3.5 Ethnography of communication 1.4 Methods and data 1.5 Economic, political, and sociolinguistic background of the community 1.6 Overview of Alto Perené grammatical practices 1.6.1 Declarative grammar 1.6.2 Interrogative grammar 1.6.3 Imperative grammar 1.6.4 Grammar of negative observations 1.7 Summary PART I. A macroperspective on discourse organization 2. Linguistic resources used for coding participation roles 2.1 Participation roles 2.2 Person markers 2.2.1 Coding of production and reception roles by person markers 2.2.2 Slippage in the coding of production and reception roles 2.2.3 Non-default interpretation of production roles 2.2.4 Production roles in reported speech 2.3 Indexing production roles by demonstrative enclitics 2.4 Production and reception roles in co-authored speech 2.5 Reception roles in imprecations 2.6 Reception roles in response cries 2.7 Pragmatically marked practices of coding reception roles 2.8 Reception roles in ‘avoidance’ speech 2.9 Summary 3. Linguistic resources used for coding membership categories 3.1 Membership categories and category-bound activities 3.2 Kin terms 3.3 Social terms 3.4 The activity of vashiventantsi ‘shaming’ 3.5 Summary 4. Organization of focused encounters 4.1 Sequential organization 4.1.1 kinkitsavaiporokitantsi ‘talk’ 4.1.2 apotoirintsi ‘gathering’ 4.2 Spatial organization 4.2.1 kinkitsavaiporokitantsi ‘talk’ 4.2.2 apotoirintsi ‘gathering’ 4.3 Summary 5. Nonverbal resources deployed by participants in interaction 5.1 Production roles 5.1.1 Gaze behavior 5.1.2 Facial action 5.1.3 Gestures 5.1.3.1 Emblems 5.1.3.2 Pointing gestures 5.1.3.3 Depictive gestures 5.2 Non-production roles 5.2.1 Gaze behavior 5.2.2 Facial action 5.2.3 Gestures 5.3 Summary 6. Turn-taking 6.1 Syntax 6.1.1 Turn organization 6.1.1.1 Turn unit structure 6.1.1.2 Turn allocation 6.1.1.3 Overlapping talk 6.1.2 The role of recognizable syntactic schemata in early projections 6.1.3 The role of prefixal verbal formatives in early projections 6.2 Prosody 6.2.1 Overview of intonation contours 6.2.2 Main intonation contours 6.2.3 Participants’ orientation to intonation contours 6.2.4 Participants’ orientation to the boundary phenomena 6.3 The role of cumulative cues in projections 6.4 Summary 7. Repair 7.1 Self-repair 7.1.1 Syntax 7.1.1.1 Self-repair operations 7.1.1.2 Scope of self-repair 7.1.1.3 Inventory and sequential placement of self-repair components 7.1.2 Prosody of self-repair 7.1.3 Bodily behavior 7.2 Other-initiated repair 7.2.1 Syntax 7.2.2 Prosody of other-initiated repair 7.2.3 Bodily behavior 7.3 Summary 8. Epistemics 8.1 ‘The morality of knowledge’ 8.2 K-plus agreements 8.3 Overview of linguistic resources used in K-plus agreements 8.4 Linguistic resources explicitly coding epistemic stance in K-plus agreements 8.4.1 Construction ari ‘it is the case’ + declarative clause 8.4.2 Stand-alone tokens of the verb ari ‘it is the case’ 8.4.3 Construction omapero ‘it is true’+ declarative clause and stand-alone tokens of omapero ‘it is true’ 8.4.4 Perception verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’ 8.4.5 Other actions coded by the epistemically dependent verbs 8.5 Summary 9. Language- and culture-specific shaping of interactional practices 9.1 The generic organization of the interactional machinery 9.2 Language- and culture-specific shaping of interactional practices 9.2.1 Turn-taking and repair practices 9.2.2 Resources used in coding participation structure 9.2.3 Collateral effects of K-plus agreement practices 9.2.4 Spillover of epistemically dependent resources 9.2.5 Prosodic structure 9.2.6 Organization of a single conversation 9.3 Envoi References