My research centers around language documentation and description, with a focus on Northwestern Amazonia and the languages of the Caquetá-Putumayo river basins. Within this area, I am working primraily with speakers of Andoke, a highly endangered language isolate nowadays spoken by only some 30 individuals. I have collaborated with Kasia Wojtylak on work with one of the last five semi-speakers of Nonuya, a Witotoan language and neighbor to Andoke. The result of this collaboration is a pedagogical phrase booklet (Moreno, Wojtylak & Menschel 2024).
Within my work on Andoke I focus primarily on its grammatical description, and the consequences of its rapidly decreasing speaker number on its structure. For the former I am dealing with a text corpus, containing traditional narratives and storyboard retellings, complemented by contextual and stimuli-based elicitations.
I am also especially interested in phonology, word-level prosody and their phonetics. Within these domains, prosodic constituency is one of my main research foci, intending to understand how morphosyntactic units such as 'word', 'affix' and 'clitic' vary cross-linguistically and language-internally, going beyond the Dixonian word bisection dogma (Tallman et al. 2024: 21).
You can find slides and manuscripts on these research topics below:
On areality and linguistic / cultural diffusion:
Coca, Jaguar and Beyond: The Dynamics of Shared Words in the Languages of Northwest Amazonia, in which Pattie Epps, Kasia Wojtylak and I present several examples of Wanderwörter and borrowings across languages of Northwestern Amazonia, concluding that lexical diffusion does present in the region. Slides available here.
Mythologies of the People of the Center: Distinct languages, shared stories?, in which Juan Alvaro Echeverri, Carlos Moreno and I discuss the role of flute-related mythology in Northwestern Amazonia. Slides available here.
Differential Object Marking in Caquetá-Putumayo Languages: An Areal Perspective of Northwest Amazonia, in which Kasia Wojtylak and I discuss the diffusion of Differential Object Marking in languages spoken between the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers in Northwestern Amazonia. Link to the published paper.
On phonological description:
Stress in Andoke: Phonology and Phonetics, my BA thesis in which I discuss the phonological characteristics of stress in Andoke, and present a production study on the phonetic correlates of Andoke stress. Manuscript available here.
Andoke word-level prosody: A preliminary view on a mixed stress / tone system, a poster which summarizes the state of the art prosodic analysis of Andoke. Poster available here.
On clause-level syntax:
Covert symmetrical diathesis alternations in Andoke (Colombian Amazon): On focus, priming and syntactic isomorphism, in which I talk about how the syntactic position in front of the obligatory auxiliary in Andoke verbal sentences, contrary to Landaburu (1976), does not correlate to focus, but rather instead could be a subject position. Slides available here.
Reviewing the Andoke pre-auxiliary position: Neither subject nor focus?, in which I review the analysis in a previous talk, and conclude that the clause-initial constituent in Andoke is neither appropriately labelled as subject nor as focus. Slides available here.
Other stuff:
Two competing direction marking systems in cross-corporal perspective: A view from Andoke (Colombian Amazon), in which I talk about how comparing Andoke data 50 years apart has brought me to think about language loss and its morphosyntactic consequences. Slides available here.