The languages of South America: deep families, areal relationships, and language contact

Muysken, Pieter; Hammarström, Harald; Birchall, Joshua; Danielsen, Swintha; Eriksen, Love; Galúcio, Ana Vilacy; Gijn, Rik van; Kerke, Simon van de; Kolipakam, Vishnupraya; Krasnoukhova, Olga; Müller, Neele; O’Connor, Loretta

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107360105.017

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In the broad lowland region of the Amazon basin, the Orinoco, and the Guianas, the late Holocene is widely regarded as a crucial timeframe for the amplification of anthropic landscape transformations [1][2][3]; the emergence of long-lived and widespread archaeological traditions [4]; and the diversification of important indigenous language families [5][6][7]. These and other processes, including increased social integration [8] and agricultural intensification [9][10][11][12][13], cannot be explained through appeal to mechanistic cause and effect nor detached from historical contingency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Did pre-Columbian populations of the Amazonian biome reach carrying capacity during the Late Holocene?

Arroyo‐Kalin

Riris

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The increasingly better-known archaeological record of the Amazon basin, the Orinoco basin and the Guianas both questions the long-standing premise of a pristine tropical rainforest environment and also provides evidence for major biome-scale cultural and technological transitions prior to European colonization. Associated changes in pre-Columbian human population size and density, however, are poorly known and often estimated on the basis of unreliable assumptions and guesswork. Drawing on recent developments in the aggregate analysis of large radiocarbon databases, here we present and examine different proxies for relative population change between 1050 BC and AD 1500 within this broad region. By using a robust model testing approach, our analyses document that the growth of pre-Columbian human population over the 1700 years prior to European colonization adheres to a logistic model of demographic growth. This suggests that, at an aggregate level, these pre-Columbian populations had potentially reached carrying capacity (however high) before the onset of European colonization. Our analyses also demonstrate that this aggregate scenario shows considerable variability when projected geographically, highlighting significant gaps in archaeological knowledge yet also providing important insights into the resilience of past human food procurement strategies. By offering a new understanding of biome-wide pre-Columbian demographic trends based on empirical evidence, our analysis hopes to unfetter novel perspectives on demic expansions, language diversification trajectories and subsistence intensification processes in the Amazonian biome during the late Holocene. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Did pre-Columbian populations of the Amazonian biome reach carrying capacity during the Late Holocene?

Arroyo‐Kalin

Riris

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…First of all, a good number of languages with postverbal negation cluster in areas. Three geographic areas stand out as hubs of postverbal negation: the 'Macro-Sudan Belt' in Africa (Güldemann 2007), New Guinea (Reesink 2002;Klamer et al 2008: 130;Vossen 2016: 121, 321), and the continent of South America as a macro-area (Dryer 2013a;Muysken et al 5. Munro (1974: 68) gives -mot as the negative suffix; however, she notes that the -t-is "the ubiquitous 'emphatic' , which has been effectively fused to the negative in Mojave and several other Yuman languages".…”

Section: Acquiring Postverbal Negation Through Language Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postverbal negation

Krasnoukhova

Auwera

Crevels

2021

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The paper sketches the state of affairs of our understanding of postverbal negation. It departs from the typological finding that there is a cross-linguistic preference for a negator to precede the verb. Nevertheless, a sizable proportion of the world’s languages adhere to a pattern with a negator following the verb, and such negators are typically morphologically bound. The existence of this pattern, unfavorable from a functional perspective, calls for a diachronic explanation. The paper takes stock of diachronic processes that can lead to postverbal negation, in general, and suffixal negation, in particular. Furthermore, a language may acquire a pattern with postverbal negation through language contact, and this is yet another perspective that the paper addresses. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this volume, highlighting the new insights.

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“…The hypothesis is that this concerns only the most unstable features, because if it concerned every feature the entire profiles would have converged. To get an idea of which features are likely to be inherently stable versus unstable, we take over the stability measure calculated in Muysken et al (2014). This essentially measures the probability that a feature value remains the same in the transition from a proto-language to a modern language within a language family.…”

Section: Riverine Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%