Synchronic, Diachronic and Typological Description of Máku

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

The goals of this project are: (1) to produce a description of Máku (a.k.a. Máko), an extinct language isolate of the Amazon region of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, including a comprehensive overview of the phonology and morphosyntax, (2) to highlight and disseminate the typological and theoretical implications of the language based on this grammatical description, (3) to investigate loanwords, language contact, and proposed remote genetic relationships involving Máku, and (4) to provide for lasting curation of the data and documentation which is accessible to scholars, linguists, and the general public. The current and projected loss of the world's linguistic diversity affects our scientific understanding about language, and reduces our ability to appreciate other cultures and languages. These consequences make study Máku urgent because it is a language isolate with no known relatives and has a profound lack of documentation, description, or analysis. This project makes available in one central location, everything that has been recorded of this extinct isolate including the many unusual and unique traits found in this language. For example, it has been stated that Máku has an evidentiality system, serial verbs, a contrast between immediate and distant future and between recent and distant past, suffixed negation, numeral classifiers, and three distinct verb classes based on subject markers, whether prefixed, suffixed, or infixed (infixes are rare crosslinguistically), a set of personal pronouns including four distinct forms for "we", an unusual system of active-stative verb alignment, and the use of /y/, a high front rounded vowel which is extremely rare in indigenous languages of the Americas. This project describes these features and investigates them in light of known linguistic characteristics in this area and in the world generally. In ensuring access to the data on this little-known linguistic isolate, this project will benefit both linguistics and other disciplines which depend on language-related material (anthropology, history, biology, geography). It will also benefit the general public interested in cultural diversity, by enhancing accessibility to information of cultural, as well as linguistic, significance. It will contribute to language typology and linguistic theory through the investigation of the unusual linguistic traits found in this language and contact linguistics through the identification and description of a series of areal traits also observed in this language. The main investigators on this project are Chris Rogers of Brigham Young University and Raoul Zamponi of the Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi sull' America Indigena (CISAI) of the University of Siena.