My main fields of interest are in the areas of syntax and morphology in Amazonian languages, especially Panará (Jê) and Mỹky (isolate), two indigenous languages of Brazil on which I periodically conduct fieldwork. I have also done fieldwork with Mẽbêngôkre (Jê), and more sporadically with Tapayuna/Kajkwakhratxi (Jê) and Kaiabi/Kawaiwete (Tupian). 

I have a broad interest in grammatical phenomena, and I am especially interested in the morphosyntax of participants: case marking of core arguments, the syntactic status of obliques, the features that participate in cross-reference morphology, and grammatical relations more generally. 

At Ghent University I am a member of the ΔiaLing research group. I am also a member (and co-founder) of the G4 and GILIAB.

Subjecthood and grammatical relations in the Amazon

In linguistic research, the term "subject" is often thrown around as an intuitive concept. Principled definitions exist, but they are anything but unanimous. In my recent Rubicon postdoctoral project, The subject in the Amazon, funded by NWO, I looked into the complexities of the notion of grammatical subject through the particular lens of Amazonian languages, and explored the reliability of subjecthood diagnostics in an Amazonian context.

In my current FWO senior postdoctoral project, Argument marking in the Amazonian languages of the Guaporé-Mamoré region, I investigate  the properties of grammatical relations in a sample of Amazonian languages spoken in the highly diverse Guaporé-Mamoré area in Brazilian and Bolivian Amazonia. The goal of this research is to deepen our knowledge of the grammatical landscape in the highly diverse and endangered indigenous languages spoken in the Guaporé-Mamoré region, and to throw light on the linguistic convergence across the language families and the numerous isolated languages in the area.


Panará

Panará (ISO: kre) is a Northern Jê language spoken in the Amazon area in central Brazil, in the region of the headwaters of the Iriri, the largest tributary of the Xingu river. The Panará were contacted in the 1970s during the expansion of settlements in the state of Mato Grosso. However, some of them had already experienced a lengthy and mostly conflictive contact with the Portuguese/Brazilian society since the XVII century, when they were known as the Southern Cayapo. 

I have been conducting fieldwork since 2014 as a guest of the Panará people, mostly in the village of Nãnsêpotiti, and wrote my PhD dissertation on the morphosyntax of case and agreement in Panará and in Jê languages. I am interested in the ways in which morphology expresses valency and grammatical relations, and more generally in the application of linguistic theory to find motivated explanations to unexpected constraints in the language. My main research at the moment focuses on a variety of empirical phenomena including alignment patterns of case and agreement, extraction asymmetries, argument structure, complex predicates, and polysynthesis. I am also interested in Panará phonology and in the diachrony of the (Northern) Jê languages.

A sample of what Panará sounds like:

Aka tall.mp3

Manoki and Mỹky

Mỹky is an isolate Amazonian language spoken by two communities, the Mỹky and the Manoki. The two communities speak different varieties of the same language, and their sociolinguistic situation is radically different. ISO code irn (for Iranxe) was established before the term Mỹky became the name used for the language, encompassing both varieties.

The Manoki, also known as Iranxe, were contacted during the first half of the 20th century in western Mato Grosso. In the 1950s the Manoki community was settled in the Jesuit mission of Utiariti, where other groups were also brought. At the mission, parents and children were separated and forbidden from speaking in their language. After reaching a population low of 33 individuals in 1960, they started a demographic recovery in part due to intermarrying with members of other linguistic groups. Today, they live in a demarcated indigenous land on the Juruena basin in Mato Grosso. The fluent speakers of Manoki amount to  four, the youngest of whom are in their 60s.

A smaller group of Mỹky speakers remained uncontacted until the 1970s.  The language is much more vital among this community, a majority of whom are native speakers, although proficient knowledge of Portuguese is not uncommon. Both communities maintain frequent contacts and consider each other as part of the same people.

Here you can hear Mỹky spoken in the Manoki variety:

luiz-manoki.mp3

Language documentation and revitalization

In addition to morphological and syntactic research, I am deeply involved in the scholarship and practice of language documentation and revitalization. Besides my endeavour to better understand the grammar of Panará, since 2015 I have been documenting the language and I am working with the community in Nãnsêpotiti to increase their access to written materials in Panará. 

In the past few years I have been working on a documentation project for Manoki, an endangered variety of the isolated Mỹky language. I am working with several young people in the Manoki nation and with the three elders who are the remaining fluent speakers of Manoki to document both the language, in multiple forms, and the collective and individual memory of the community. 

I am also working with the Manoki school teachers to revitalize the language among the younger members of the community, and produce language materials of various types. To this end, in 2019 we created the Watjuho Ja'a Collective. With the name "together for language", this language study collective brings together a group of motivated Manoki language learners. It also holds Manoki language schools, language meetings, and produces language-learning materials. 

Corpus linguistics

I have started to work on a project to compile an annotated corpus using Panará data collected in the field. Before being a field linguist, I was briefly a historical linguist working on parsed corpora with a project at UQÀM and the University of Pennsylvania. Here is a syntactically parsed corpus of Le Roman dou Graal - Manuscrit de Modène (Robert de Boron ~1210, edited by Bernard Cerquiglini) that I tagged and corrected using CorpusSearch: