1 the Areal Typology of Western Middle and South America

The areal typology of western Middle and South America: towards a comprehensive view ***pre-publication version, do not cite without permission*** Matthias Urban DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Words, Bones, Genes, Tools,” University of Tübingen Rümelinstr. 19-23 72070 Tübingen, Germany Email: [email protected] Hugo Reyes-Centeno DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Words, Bones, Genes, Tools,” University of Tübingen Rümelinstr. 19-23 72070 Tübingen, Germany Email: [email protected] Kate Bellamy Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Leiden University Postbus 9515 2300RA Leiden, The Netherlands Email: [email protected] Matthias Pache Department of Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn Oxfordstr. 15 53111 Bonn, Germany Email: [email protected] Against a multidisciplinary background this contribution explores the areal typology of western Middle and South America. Based on a new language sample and a typological questionnaire that is specifically designed to bring some of the poorly documented and extinct languages into the debate, we explore the areal distribution of 77 linguistic traits in 44 languages. While one of the goals of the present article is to provide a general up-to-date view of areal patterning of these traits on a large scale, we also explore a number of specific questions in more detail. In particular, we address the relationship between known language areas like Mesoamerica and the Central Andes with their respective peripheries, the possibility of detecting an areal-typological signal that predates the rise of these linguistic areas, and, finally, the question of linguistic convergence along the Pacific coast. We find that, while the languages of the Mesoamerican periphery are rather diffuse typologically, the structural profiles of the Central Andean languages are embedded organically into a more general cluster of Andean typological affinity that alters continuously as one moves through geographical space. In different ways, the typological properties of the peripheral languages may reflect a situation that goes back to time depths which are greater than that of the emergence of the Mesoamerican and Central Andean linguistic areas. Finally, while we can confirm typological affinities with Mesoamerica for some languages of coastal South America, we do not find support for large- scale linguistic convergence on the Pacific coast. Keywords: typology, areal linguistics, language contact, Mesoamerican languages, Andean languages 1 1 Introduction1 Linguistic structures in the Americas have been explored from an areal point of view with renewed interest in recent years (e.g. Adelaar 2012; Campbell 2012; Epps forthcoming; Michael et al. 2014; contributions to O’Connor and Muysken 2014; Urban forthcoming a; Valenzuela 2015). In light of the awesome genealogical and structural diversity of language in the Americas, this is a rich and challenging field of research in its own right. However, areality in linguistic structures does not arise without a corresponding sociolinguistic background, which is in turn part of a more general sociocultural setting. Depending on the relative ease with which particular linguistic properties can be transferred from one language to another in different situations of language contact (itself a subject of considerable theoretical interest, cf. e.g. Nichols 2003), areal-typological similarities can usually be assumed to reflect periods of interaction between speakers of the languages involved at some point of time depth. Areal typology is therefore one of the possible points of access to the linguistic prehistory of the Americas. Indeed, a number of the areal-typological studies mentioned above have explicitly sought to bring the linguistic evidence to bear on questions of prehistoric developments in (parts of) the Americas. Our study is not different in this regard. We focus on the exploration of a large subregion of the Americas, namely the western parts of Middle America (which we define as that part of the main American landmass from Mexico in the north to Panama in the south) and South America, with a particular focus on the Pacific coastal regions.2 The choice of this area of investigation is indeed motivated by evidence from outside linguistics, which we discuss in 2.1. At the same time, different parts of this region have already been explored from the point of view of areal linguistics and are known to host a number of convergence areas. We discuss extant work from linguistics that is relevant to our study in Section 2.2, where we seek to provide an updated comprehensive broad-scale view of the areal distribution of linguistic structures in this part of the Americas. This is the overarching goal of the present paper. In light of the massive loss of linguistic diversity that set in with European contact, attaining this goal requires us to also pay attention to the extinct and poorly documented languages that were once spoken in this region, even though the available material is not optimal and significant gaps in documentation remain. We discuss past and present linguistic diversity in our study region in more detail in Section 3.1. This goal of including a maximum of linguistic diversity determines to a significant extent also the design of the study, in particular the questionnaire. We explain the design of our study further in Section 3.2. The subtitle, which alludes to a “comprehensive view,” is thus to be read in two ways: first, it refers to the broad-scale scope of this study, the geographic scope of which is larger than that of most recent contributions. Second, we also aim at comprehensiveness in another sense, namely that we aim to be more comprehensive than previous studies in bringing extinct and poorly documented languages into the debate under a unified and general framework of analysis. 1 Work on this article was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 295918, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project Nos. UR 310/1-1 and FOR 2237. We thank Willem F.H. Adelaar, former members of the MesAndLin(g)k project in Leiden, and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. 2 In contrast to these geographically defined terms, we use the term Mesoamerica to refer to a certain culture area and the associated linguistic area within Middle America. 2 In addition, we seek to explore more specific questions that appear to require further consideration in line with our literature review in Section 2.2. These include the relationship between the languages of two known linguistic areas within our geographical scope, Mesoamerica and the Central Andes, to those on the respective peripheries. Regarding the Central Andes, we focus in particular on the northern and southern periphery. A loosely related question pertains to the possibility of areal- typological affinities in the respective areas that could be older than the rise of these language areas. Our inclusive study design is well-suited to explore this question. Finally, a third question we aim to explore in more detail concerns the possibilities of linguistic contacts among Pacific peoples from Mesoamerica to the Central Andes. Here, we do so with a focus on the possibility of the diffusion of phonological and grammatical traits rather than lexical similarities which are evaluated in Urban (forthcoming c; see also Bellamy 2018). We explain these questions in Section 2.3. 2 Contextualization 2.1 Interdisciplinary Background This section provides a brief sketch of aspects of the pre-Colombian Americas that appear particularly relevant as background to the areal-typological study of this paper. Topics treated in this section are accordingly highly selective. In addition, while some points of contact with the (historical) linguistics of the Americas are already interwoven here, a detailed review of linguistic areality in Middle America and western (Pacific and Andean) South America itself is provided separately in Section 2.2. The human presence in the Americas dates back at least 15,000 years before present, when groups of people entered the continents from eastern Asia via the Beringian landbridge (Goebel et al. 2008; Braje et al. 2017). Taking into account the existence of very early archaeological sites in the southernmost parts of the double continent, such as Monte Verde (southern Chile), it appears that these groups dispersed rapidly across the then still unpeopled continents. The route or routes taken by these first colonizers is still not clear. There is, however, evidence from mitochondrial DNA that supports early migrations by a coastal route that are possibly related to a first entry by a Pacific route (Perego et al. 2009; Bodner et al. 2012; Llamas et al. 2016). People may have used watercraft and relied on the rich maritime resources of the Pacific for subsistence (Erlandson et al. 2007). At any rate, a maritime Pacific orientation is something deeply entrenched in the Americas, as can be inferred from early coastal sites such as the mentioned Monte Verde site or the Quebrada Jaguay site on Peru’s South Coast. Linguistic data is evaluated by different methodologies as far as very early population movements into the Americas are concerned. Greenberg’s (1987) attempt to reduce American linguistic diversity to just three language families, corresponding to three waves of migration of which the largest “Amerind” family would correspond to the first entry, is generally rejected because of methodological deficiencies. Accordingly, the state of the art still counts around 150 linguistic families in the Americas (Campbell 1997); progress at reducing this number is still being made, but slowly. The picture of extreme linguistic diversity coupled with the assumed short human presence is often taken as evidence for social conditions in the first phase after settlement that would promote linguistic diversification (e.g. Muysken et al. 2014: 303, though see Nettle 1999) or for the assumption that human presence in the Americas must be much older than commonly accepted (Nichols 1990).

Load more