Shiwiar: Preliminary findings from fieldwork in the Amazon

Venue: Lipsius, 307

In this talk, preliminary findings from fieldwork on Shiwiar will be presented. The talk will be made up of two parts. In the first part a typological overview of the language will be provided. Based on characteristics of Shiwiar phonology and morphology, it will be argued that Shiwiar is typologically strange for the area in which it is spoken in that it behaves more like an Andean language than an Amazonian one. In the second part of the talk, I will address the main difficulty that I’ve had so far in analysing Shiwiar phonology, namely whether the language has tone or stress (or both).