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‘With One LIP, with Two Lips’: Parallelism in Nahuatl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

William Bright
William Bright*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
*
Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0295
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Abstract

Texts in Classical Nahuatl of the year 1524, in the genre of formal oratory, reveal extensive use of lines showing parallel morphosyntactic and semantic structure; this parallelism expresses likeness rather than contrast, and is organized in binary sequences which display successive embedding. Analysis and translation of an extended passage point to (a) the applicability of structural analysis to ‘expressive’ as well as ‘referential’ texts; and (b) the importance of understanding oral literatures not just in terms imposed by translators, but in the light of their inherent esthetic principles.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 1990, pp. 437 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This represents the author's Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC, December 1989. Thanks for stimuli and suggestions go to Robert Austerlitz, Lyle Campbell, Dell Hymes, Frances Karttunen, Jorge Klor de Alva, Lise Menn, Juan Pascoe, Joel Sherzer, and Tony Woodbury.

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