Ebook: A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar (Chicham)

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.