I am working on the documentation and description of Vaímajã, an Eastern Tukanoan language spoken in the Vaupés region of Colombia. I received a Glottobank/ELDP grant for this project, and contributed some preliminary analyses of the grammar to Grambank. Recordings and ELAN files can be found at the Endangered Languages Archive.

This project is built on principles of equality and sustainability and the subject of the documentation is in large part decided by community members. Together, we have produced a new alphabet for the language, and we are also working on a booklet with traditional narratives, curated and recounted by community members. In this light, I think it is also important to focus on communication between linguists and non-linguists, in order to find our common ground and work toward outcomes that are beneficial for all involved.

My dissertation will entail a grammar sketch of the Eastern Tukanoan language Vaímajã, comprising the first grammatical description of the language, followed by a more in-depth analysis of the nominal categorization system of the language, where I will focus on the interaction between its two systems. These systems are generally called gender and classifiers in the literature on Tukanoan languages. Gender refers to a system of four or five highly grammaticalized markers, and classifiers refers to a system consisting of a large set of markers with similar distributions as gender, but less grammaticalized. These markers participate in agreement within the noun phrase and gender is also marked on predicates, albeit with different yet formally similar forms.

Person indexing on predicates is marked with portmanteau suffixes conveying the person, number, and gender of the subject in intransitive clauses, and of the agent in transitive clauses, as well as aspect, modality, and evidentiality. The Vaímajã evidentiality system is of particular interest since it distinguishes five evidentiality values: visual, non-visual, inference, conjecture, and reported evidentiality. Perfect and imperfect aspect must consequently be distinguished for each of these evidentiality values. Additionally, direct evidentiality –viz. visual and non-visual– furthermore distinguishes evidence that is being perceived simultaneous to the time of speaking, and evidence that has been perceived beforehand but is no longer available. For reasons of convenience, I refer to the former as present tense, as opposed to perfect and imperfect aspect, but note that this is distinct from the commonly held notion of tense as the relation between the event and time of speaking. The interaction of person, number, gender, tense, aspect, and evidentiality gives rise to a verbal paradigm with 48 cells, with only marginal syncretism.

In 2018, I attended the Amazonicas VII conference in Baños, Ecuador, and the acompanying summer school in Quito. Afterward, Martine Bruil and Andrés Pablo Salanova organized a field school to Sototsiaya, an Ecuadorian Siona village, where I gathered data for my BA thesis on grammaticalization of Serial verbs in the language.

I maintain good contacts with the people of Sototsiaya and hope to work with them again sometime.