Introduction

 

This site is dedicated to presenting research recently undertaken on the topic of information structure in Amazonian languages.

 

The research presented is based on the work of various linguists at a variety of institutions. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0344361. The principal investigators for the grant were Robert Van Valin, Jr. and Daniel Everett. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in

this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

 

Four genetically unaffiliated Amazonian languages were investigated, in accordance with the project’s goals. This site contains , among other things, samples of the data analyzed during the course of the investigations.

 

The data for each language can be accessed by clicking on a language’s name on the navigation bar above. The data include audio files, prosodic analyses, and phonetic transcriptions.

There is also a section of this site devoted to presenting  papers written in association with the project. These papers include accounts of various information structure phenomena in the relevant languages. Some of the papers, e.g. O’Connor 2007 and Everett 2007, relate findings on prosody and information structure to the theory of Role and Reference Grammar.

 

The papers can be accessed by clicking on the Papers link in the navigation bar.