Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

6 Bernard Comrie & Lucía Golluscio
sizes. Tetsualü is also a mixture of languages and dialects, a mixture of ethnic
groups over a person’s life history. The Upper Xingu is tetsualü; Ipatse Village
is tetsualü; each Upper Xingu person is tetsualü. The Upper Xingu thus confronts
us with stimulating questions, especially when we try to understand its
historical formation and the confluence of diverse languages and traditions at
different scales of time and space.
Muysken et al. start from the hypothesis put forward by Crevels and Van der
Voort (2008) that the Guaporé-Mamoré region, situated on the two sides of the
Bolivia-Rondônia (Brazil) border, forms a linguistic area. The work by Crevels
and Van der Voort is based on cultural traits shared across the region and on
specific linguistic features discovered by the authors. As such it takes a bottomup
strategy. The present paper, in contrast, follows a top-down strategy, using
a set of independently selected grammatical features. The central question is:
Do the languages of the Guaporé-Mamoré have more common traits than a
random sample of other South American languages?
González presents phonological evidence that supports the hypothesis of the
Chaco as a linguistic area. Specifically, the author examines the phonetic features
and the phonological oppositions shared by the languages of the area
and compares these findings with what is found in neighboring regions. Common
phonetic and phonological features are identified that can be explained
by bilingualism and prolonged contact among speakers of the languages involved.
In addition, the article describes phonological processes (e.g. palatalization
and vowel harmony), with the aim of demonstrating that it is the cooccurrence
of these processes together with uncommon phonetic and phonological
features that contribute to the characterization of the region as a linguistic
area. With contact linguistics as a theoretical framework, the author
assumes that given the appropriate sociolinguistic setting, even typologically
marked phonological features may trespass genetic boundaries contributing to
the constitution of linguistic areas. The findings are presented in tables and
maps that show the genetic and geographical distribution of the features under
study.
Ciccone & Nercesian show that the geographical distribution of switch reference
in South America follows clear areal patterning, with presence of switch
reference in the northern and central Andes and in northern Amazonia, its
absence in the rest of Amazonia, in the Chaco, and in Patagonia and the southern
Andes. They also discuss the distribution of subtypes of switch reference
and of other devices for keeping track of referents, thus providing an initial
step in the overall investigation of reference tracking in indigenous languages
of South America.