Abstract
This work represents a description of Kanoê, by Brazilian linguist and literary scientist Laércio Bacelar. This is the first and only comprehensive study on this indigenous language of the Southwestern Brazilian Amazon region. It is based on extended periods of descriptive linguistic fieldwork in three different indigenous reserves and a boomtown slum. Since the language is spoken by only five individuals, most of them elderly and living under precarious circumstances, the language is moribund. The affiliation of Kanoê has not been established, and it is possible that it belongs to no known language family at all. Therefore, its study is of importance for the reconstruction of the unwritten indigenous history of the Amazon region. Without funding by prof. Pieter Muysken's Spinoza award, this language would be allowed to disappear without leaving behind any trace. Chapter 1 introduces the culture, history and circumstances of the Kanoê people. Chapter 2 contains the phonological system of the language, and a practical orthography for use by its speakers. Chapter 3 describes Kanoê morphology in general, and nominal morphosyntax in particular. Special attention is paid to nominal classifiers and their cross-reference properties. Chapter 4 concerns verbal morphology and contains a detailed analysis of the intricate verbal person cross-reference system, incorporation, directionality, valency change, negation, tense and aspect. Chapter 5 is about Kanoê sentence structure, its constituents and their relative order, with special attention to complex sentences and their functional load. Chapter 6 discusses a number of semantic sub-areas in the lexicon, such as e.g. body parts, kinship terms and proper names. Chapter 7 is a collection of transcribed texts and songs with morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and free translations. Finally, family relationships of the Kanoê people are described in appendices, the last of which contains some photos. An extensive Kanoê-Portuguese dictionary is soon to follow
