Since the beginning of the week I’ve been here in Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon itself, having a great time at the fifth biennial meeting of Amazonicas, the major international conference dedicated to Amazonian linguistics. Yesterday Zach O’Hagan and I gave back-to-back talks (citations below) presenting the first major results to come out of the work of the Berkeley Comparative Tupí-Guaraní Group. In the first talk, we presented a new internal classification of the TG family (slides available here), based on a large comparative lexical dataset that we have spent the last several years developing, and in the second one, we presented a proposal for the Proto-Tupí-Guaraní homeland and the migrations that account for the distribution of its modern daughter languages (slides available here). The audience had many interesting and valuable comments and questions for us, several of which will keep us busy until the next Amazonicas.
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Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia, Zachary O’Hagan, Keith Bartolomei, Erin Donnelly, and Lev Michael. 2014. An internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní using computational phylogenetic methods. Presented at Amazonicas V, Belém, Brazil, May 28, 2014. [pdf]
O’Hagan, Zachary, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Keith Barolomei, Erin Donnelly, and Lev Michael. 2014. The geographical spread of the Tupí-Guaraní family: Evidence from computational phylogenetics. Presented at Amazonicas V, Belém, Brazil, May 28, 2014. [pdf]
Amazonian Linguistics 