Word formation in Kallawaya: nominal compounding and noun incorporation

• Applicant: Dr. Katja Hannß
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 218063607

The proposed follow-up project will be concerned with the word formation processes of nominal compounding and noun incorporation in Kallawaya, which is a mixed and secret language, spoken by initiated herbalists in north-western Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca. The grammar of Kallawaya derives largely from a southern Quechua variety, while nowadays extinct and poorly documented Pukina is said to have been the main lexifier language. Kallawaya arose from a shift situation, where a former Pukina speaking community shifted to Quechua, thereby losing a considerable amount of Pukina lexical items. It is hypothesised that the word formation processes of nominal compounding and noun incorporation are means to replace the lost Pukina vocabulary by creating new words on the basis of Pukina and Kallawaya lexical items. In order to investigate these word formation processes and to relate them to the secret lexicon of Kallawaya, three steps of research are proposed: 1) Selection of all instances of nominal compounding and noun incorporation from the Kallawaya database created in the current project; 2) classification of these selected forms according to morphological, semantic, and etymological criteria; these selected forms will be sorted into two databases; 3) evaluation of these two databases with respect to the criteria applied in selecting and classifying nominal compounds and noun incorporations. For studying compounding and incorporation in Kallawaya, general typological features of these word formation processes as well as more language-specific criteria will be considered. That is, nominal compounds will be investigated with respect to headedness and the grammatical relation that holds between the head and the non-head component(s). Moreover, they will be classified as either root or synthetic compounds. Regarding noun incorporations, the word class and the morphological form of the incorporated element will be examined as will be the semantic relationship between the verb and its incorporated noun. In addition, the valency of the incorporating verb will also be taken into account. The questions about the semantic domain a compound or an incorporation can be attributed to as well as that about the etymological composition of a construction aim at relating compounding and incorporation to the secret Kallawaya lexicon. The proposed investigation will be the first that examines word formation processes in Kallawaya. It is therefore of relevance not only for the study of secret languages, but also from a broader typological perspective by contributing to the database on word formation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants