This volume provides considerable information about South America's indigenous languages and convincingly synthesizes findings from archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics. Drawing on traditional comparative and newer quantitative methodologies, it should prove interesting to scholars from a wide range of disciplines.
The book's first half focuses on examining individual languages and language families within their broader areal and genetic contexts. Loretta O'Connor's contribution (pp. 73–101) investigates structural features in the Chibchan family and its neighbors in the Isthmo-Colombian area; methodologically, she asks whether distinguishing diachronically stable features from unstable ones can reveal deep historical relationships. Simon van de Kerke & Pieter Muysken then investigate native Andean languages (pp. 126–49), relatively few of which survived the European invasion. The authors use the Neighbor-Net algorithm, which calculates phylogenetic networks, to assess the families’ relationship. They show that, while the Aymaran and Quechuan families are genetically unrelated, their history of intense contact and convergence makes it extremely difficult to disentagle the two on purely structural grounds. ‘The Arawakan matrix’ (pp. 152–76), by Love Eriksen & Swintha Danielson, and ‘The Tupian expansion’ (pp. 177–99), by Eriksen & Ana Vilacy Galucio, are best read together, as they illustrate important contrasts between the continent's two most far-flung families. The Arawak-speaking peoples maintained a massive trade network for centuries across significant geographic distances; the result is a murky phylogenetic tree that lacks clear internal divisions. Tupian peoples followed a different path: speakers of Tupi-Guaraní (TG) and its nearest relatives accomplished speedy expansion through warfare and cultural absorption, while most other Tupians stayed put in what now corresponds to the Brazilian state of Rondônia. So, unlike Arawak, the Tupian family tree exhibits more clearly separated branches.
The second half of the volume is concerned with synchronic typology. Particularly interesting are the chapters on verbal argument marking (pp. 223–49), noun phrase typology (pp. 250–73), and nominalization as a subordination strategy (pp. 274–96), by Joshua Birchall, Olga Krasnoukhova, and Rik van Gijn, respectively. Birchall and Krasnoukhova's contributions show that South American languages do not fall into a crisp divide between Andean and Amazonian, despite previous claims in the literature. A more robust distinction is instead one of East versus West, with the latter subsuming the Andes and Amazonia's western edge. This finding nicely complements Rik van Gijn's chapter, ‘The Andean foothills and adjacent Amazonian fringe’ (pp. 102–25); he shows that Amazonia and the Andes meet in a region of structural gradience, without sharp typological divides. Less persuasive is Neele Müller's examination (pp. 203–22) of the desiderative as a verbal category, given the lack of clear criteria distinguishing suffixes from independent verbs/auxiliaries across the sampled languages. (This chapter also contains misclassifications. The Yuki language belongs to TG, not the non-TG remainder of Tupian. And Gavião, described in Denny Moore's 1984 dissertation, is Tupian, not Macro-Jê.)
My only major complaint is that some maps use illegible or incorrect legends; for example, on page 6 it is difficult to distinguish Macro-Jê, Tupian, Panoan, and Tacanan. Such issues aside, I strongly recommend this book, which addresses fascinating questions about this linguistically diverse continent. Though many of those questions remain unresolved, this impressive volume demonstrates the extensive progress made in recent years.
