Last week a box showed up from Brill with shiny new copies of the volume on negation in Arawak languages that Tania Granadillo and I edited. Springing from a Society for the Studies of the Indigenous Languages of the America (SSILA) panel that Tania and I organized in 2010, the volume includes detailed descriptions of negation constructions in Apurinã (by Sidney Facundes), Garifuna (by Pam Munro and Caitlin Gallagher), Kurripako (by Tania Granadillo), Lokono (by Marie-France Patte), Mojeño Trinitario (by Françoise Rose), Nanti (by yours truly), Paresi (by Ana Paula Brandão), Tariana (by Alexandra Aikhenvald), and Wauja (by Chris Ball). There is also a final chapter in which I present a typological overview of negation in the family, based on these chapters and other published materials. Think ahead: this would make an excellent stocking-stuffer for all the Arawak specialists on your Christmas list, or even for that typologist or synctactician interested in negation who has everything.
Tania and I were originally motivated to organize the panel by our interest in seeing Arawak linguistics become a more actively comparative enterprise. Perhaps stemming from the considerable geographical dispersal of the family, and despite good descriptive work done on many of the languages of the family, Arawak linguistics has lagged behind traditions focused on other major South American language families, such as Tupían and Carib, in terms of historical and comparative work. The chapters in the volume point to some interesting patterns – and significant diversity – in Arawak negation constructions, giving us a sense of how this important grammatical sub-system works in the family.
The volume is bargain priced* at ~$127 and is available through Amazon or Brill.
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*That is, bargain priced in comparison to having to go do fieldwork on all the languages in the volume yourself.
Amazonian Linguistics 