Conversational structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru

Download or read book Conversational structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru written by Elena Mihas and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the research community, the book is a focused exploration of discourse patterns of Alto Perené Arawak, with emphasis on conversational structures. The book’s methodological scaffold is based on proposals and insights from multiple research fields, such as comparative conversation analysis, sociology, interactional linguistics, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and prosodic typology. The interactional patterns of a small Arawak language of Peru are shown to share the common infrastructure reported in the organization of conversation across other languages and cultures. Yet the analysis demonstrates a variety of unique nuances in the organization of interactional behavior of Alto Perené Arawak participants. The peculiarities observed are attributed to the language-specific semiotic resources and participants’ orientation to the local cultural norms. The book’s structured examination of conversational data of a small indigenous language of South America is anticipated to be of utility to linguistic research on understudied non-Western languages.