Mapuche is the language of the Mapuche (or Araucanians), the native inhabitants of central Chile. The Mapuche language, also called Mapudungu, is spoken by about 400,000 people in Chile and 40,000 in Argentina. The Mapuche people, estimated at about one million, constitute the majority of the Chilean indigenous population. The history of the Mapuche is the story of passionate fighters who managed to stop the Inca's but succumbed to the Spanish invaders after two and a half century of warfare. The relationship of the Mapuche language with other Amerindian languages has not yet been established. Mapuche is a highly agglutinative language with a complex verbal morphology. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed description of the Mapuche language. It contains a grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax), a collection of texts (stories, conversations and songs) with morphological analyses and free translations, and a Mapuche-English dictionary with a large number of derivations and examples. The grammar is preceded by a socio-historical sketch of the Mapuche people and a brief discussion of previous studies of the Mapuche language. The material for the description was collected by the author with the help of five Mapuche speakers with attention to the dialectal differences between them. The abundance of thoroughly analysed examples makes for a lively decription of the language. The intricacy of the verbal morphology will arouse the interest not only of those who practice Amerindian linguistics but also of those who are interested in language theory and language typology.

This work contains a comprehensive description of Kwaza, which is an endangered and unclassified indigenous language of Southern Rondônia, Brazil. The Kwaza language, also known in the literature as Koaiá, is spoken by around 25 people today. Until recently, our knowledge of Kwaza was based on only three short word lists, from 1938, 1943 and 1984. Like the language, the culture and the history of its speakers are undocumented. The Kwaza people as an ethnic group have been decimated by increasing ecological, physical, social and cultural pressure from Western civilisation since contact in the past century. This is the situation for many indigenous peoples of Rondônia and of the Amazon region in general. Linguists expect that the majority of these peoples will cease to exist as distinct language communities during the coming decades. The present work is intended as a contribution to the documentation and preservation of the languages of the Amazon basin. In this respect, Kwaza has represents an especially urgent case in view of its undetermined classification, the lack of documentation and its endangered status. This work is based on the author ́s personal fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2002, and it consists of three parts. Part I contains a thorough description of the phonology and morphosyntax of the language and a concise overview of its social, cultural and historical context. Part II contains a diverse selection of transcribed and translated texts with interlinear morphological analyses. Part III is a dictionary of Kwaza, including many examples and an English-Kwaza register. This complete description is of interest to linguists in general, scholars of South American languages in particular, and anthropologists and historians interested in the Guaporé region.

Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.