DOCSLIB.ORG

A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar Issue Date: 2020-06-29 389

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar Issue Date: 2020-06-29 389 Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/123115 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Kohlberger, M. Title: A grammatical description of Shiwiar Issue Date: 2020-06-29 389 Summary in English A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar This dissertation is a grammar of Shiwiar, a Chicham (Jivaroan) language spoken by around 1,200 people in the Amazonian lowlands of eastern Ecuador and northern Peru. This work is the first grammatical description of the language, and it is based on a 30-hour audio-visual corpus of natural speech data, collected over 12 months of fieldwork between 2011 and 2016 in the Pastaza province of Ecuador. The main goal of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of all major areas of linguistic structure in Shiwiar, and also to engage with areal and typological literature to shed light on the diachronic development of those structures and their functions. In Chapter 1, the theoretical premises of this work are explained. This dissertation is the outcome of a data-driven, bottom-up approach to researching language. It is based on the assumption that formal linguistic structures are moulded over time by communicative, social, cognitive and anatomical pressures. Therefore, in this work, the Shiwiar language is considered within its social and cultural context, and it is studied by means of real data that were produced in an interactive and discursive environment. Furthermore, this work is committed to a high standard of data transparency: every example in the text is cited to its original source recording, so that the reader can evaluate the entire analytic process. In Chapter 2, the Shiwiar language is introduced. From a typological perspective, Shiwiar exhibits features that are typical of other Andean and western Amazonian languages, including a small phoneme inventory, highly synthetic morphology, predicate-final constituent order, a small class of numerals, complex tense-aspect-mood marking in verbs and extensive use of clause chaining. Shiwiar is a member of the Chicham language family, and it is closely related to its 4 sister languages. However, it has also had close contact with unrelated languages of the region, particularly Quechuan languages and Kandozi-Chapra, which has left clear traces in the Shiwiar lexicon, phonology, morphology and syntax. More recently, Shiwiar has come into contact with Spanish and, although Shiwiar is still spoken by virtually everyone in the Shiwiar community, there are initial indications that younger people may shift to preferentially using Spanish in the future. Chapter 3 is an ethnographic sketch of the Shiwiar people. The Shiwiar Nation is one of the fifteen officially recognised Indigenous nations in Ecuador, and the vast majority of Shiwiar people live in one of fourteen villages in the Pastaza province, within a territory that is approximately the size of Luxembourg. Traditionally, Shiwiar people have sustained themselves 390 through hunting, horticulture, fishing and gathering, but their lifestyle is currently undergoing rapid change through increasing contact to Ecuadorean mainstream culture. Ritual songs are an important part of Shiwiar oral tradition, and during celebrations they are often accompanied by flutes, drums and bow instruments. Most Shiwiar marriages are exogamous (i.e. they involve people from different ethnic groups), and children inherit ethnic identity from their fathers. Exogamous marriage traditions have resulted in long-term multilingualism in the entire region, which is reinforced in every new generation. It is not unusual for Shiwiar people to speak three or more languages. Chapter 4 is a detailed description of the methodology and sources that were used in this work. The data was collected through collaborative fieldwork with the Shiwiar community in three main sites: Juyuintsa, Puyo and Shell. Over six field trips, 110 recordings were made of diverse speech genres, including traditional narratives, personal anecdotes, village conversations, political speeches and media interviews. Over thirty Shiwiar collaborators were involved in the recording and annotation of the data. In the interest of scientific transparency, the entire corpus is being deposited into the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA). Chapter 5 is an analysis of Shiwiar phonetics and phonology. The phonemic inventory of the language includes 14 consonants and 8 vowels. Additionally, there are loan phonemes that only occur in Spanish loanwords, and a marginal phoneme, namely the glottal stop, which only occurs in a small number of words. A subset of seven consonants – /p, t, k, m, n, h, w/ – are palatalised when they follow a high front vowel. Nasality spreads from nasal vowels in both directions until the nearest obstruent or up to the word boundary. Although syllables were historically made up of a single consonant and a vowel, the language currently allows syllables with complex onsets and codas, which were formed as a result of three historic elision processes: vowel apocope, consonant apocope and vowel syncope. Some elision processes are still at work in the language today: for example, word final nasal stops are optionally elided in fast speech. Phonological words in Shiwiar may not have fewer than two vowels; if an unbound morpheme only has one vowel, the vowel needs to be doubled when the morpheme is uttered in isolation. Finally, all Shiwiar words exhibit a single prosodic prominence that shares the characteristics of both stress (e.g. it is manifested by higher pitch, longer duration and increased amplitude) and tone (e.g. the prominence can spread over multiple syllables), but its placement is not predictable and it varies from word to word. Chapter 6 is an overview of Shiwiar morphology, syntax and information structure. There are six word classes in the language: nominals, verbs, adverbs, quantifiers, discourse particles and ideophones. These word classes can be differentiated by their semantic properties, their morphological 391 behaviour and their syntactic distribution. Shiwiar morphology is highly synthetic, and it tends towards agglutination although there are also some cases of fusion. Morphemes differ greatly in the degree of boundedness that they exhibit, ranging from unbound roots that can appear on their own to clitics and affixes that never appear unless they are combined with a root. The order of constituents in a Shiwiar clause is not fixed and it can be manipulated to express information structure, but there is a strong tendency towards SOV order. Shiwiar has strict nominative-accusative alignment, and grammatical relations in the language primarily revolve around the distinction between subject and object. This distinction is morphologically marked on both the predicate and its arguments: verbs have pronominal indexation and nominals are flagged by case. Shiwiar exhibits a typologically rare form of differential object marking, whereby the case marking of an object in a clause is determined by a property of the subject. A very prominent syntactic structure in the language is the so-called clause chain, whereby semantically dependent clauses combine with each other into a large chain, and the marking of tense, subject and mood is only found on the final verb. Finally, Shiwiar speakers can employ a rich array of strategies – prosodic, syntactic and/or morphological – to mark information structure, like focus and topic. Chapter 7 deals with nominal morphology and the noun phrase. Nominals can be subdivided into nouns, adjectives and pronouns. These can either appear on their own or they can combine to form compounds. Nominals can be modified by derivational morphology, such as a diminutive marker or negation. Possessed nouns are inflected for the person and number of the possessor. Nominals can also be inflected for six grammatical cases: object case, genitive case, locative case, ablative case, comitative case and temporal case. Some of the morphological marking on nominals, for example the vocative, the interrogative marker or topic and focus marking, have semantics that are rooted to discourse and interaction. Nominals can be used predicatively if they combine with a copula enclitic. Although there are no productive class-changing derivation processes for nominals in the current- day language, there are indications in the lexicon that nominals could be verbalised historically. In syntactic terms, when nominals function as arguments in a clause, they appear in noun phrases. A noun phrase is minimally made up of a single nominal, but it can also be complex. In complex noun phrases, nominals are modified by determiners (such as demonstrative pronouns), adjectives or relative clauses. Nominals can also be coordinated within a noun phrase by simple juxtaposition or by the use of comitative case. Chapter 8 deals with the most intricate morphological domain in the language: verbal morphology. Valency is lexically defined for Shiwiar verbs: every verb in the language is inherently intransitive, transitive or ditransitive. However, valency can be increased by applicative and causative morphology, or it can be decreased by reflexive and reciprocal morphology. Shiwiar verbs 392 are obligatorily marked for aspect in almost every grammatical context, and there are three aspectual categories: perfective, imperfective and durative. Perfective and imperfective aspect are contrastive in present and past tense finite clauses, and in some participant nominalisations. In all other contexts, the choice
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Languages of the Middle Andes in Areal-Typological Perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran
    Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran Willem F.H. Adelaar 1. Introduction1 Among the indigenous languages of the Andean region of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, Quechuan and Aymaran have traditionally occupied a dominant position. Both Quechuan and Aymaran are language families of several million speakers each. Quechuan consists of a conglomerate of geo- graphically defined varieties, traditionally referred to as Quechua “dialects”, not- withstanding the fact that mutual intelligibility is often lacking. Present-day Ayma- ran consists of two distinct languages that are not normally referred to as “dialects”. The absence of a demonstrable genetic relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran language families, accompanied by a lack of recognizable external gen- etic connections, suggests a long period of independent development, which may hark back to a period of incipient subsistence agriculture roughly dated between 8000 and 5000 BP (Torero 2002: 123–124), long before the Andean civilization at- tained its highest stages of complexity. Quechuan and Aymaran feature a great amount of detailed structural, phono- logical and lexical similarities and thus exemplify one of the most intriguing and intense cases of language contact to be found in the entire world. Often treated as a product of long-term convergence, the similarities between the Quechuan and Ay- maran families can best be understood as the result of an intense period of social and cultural intertwinement, which must have pre-dated the stage of the proto-lan- guages and was in turn followed by a protracted process of incidental and locally confined diffusion.
    [Show full text]
  • Descriptive and Comparative Research on South American Indian Languages
    Historical overview: Descriptive and comparative research on South American Indian languages Willem F. H. Adelaar 1. Introduction The extreme language diversity that was characteristic for South America must have been a challenge to native groups throughout the subcontinent, struggling to maintain commercial and political relations with each other. Due to the absence of phonetically based writing systems in pre-European times there is hardly any documentation about the way cross-linguistic communication was achieved. How- ever, the outlines of a conscious linguistic policy can be assumed from the Incas’ success in imposing their language upon a millenary multilingual society. Second- language learning, often by users of typologically widely different languages, must have been an everyday concern to the subjects of the Inca empire. Sixteenth-cen- tury chroniclers often report in a matter-of-fact way on the ease and rapidity with which native Americans mastered the language of their conquerors, be it Quechua, Spanish or any other language. Apart from such cases of political necessity, there are indications that language played an essential role in many South American native societies and that it could be manipulated and modified in a deliberate way. The use of stylistic speech levels among the Cuna (Sherzer 1983) and of ceremo- nial discourse among the Mbyá (Cadogan 1959; Clastres 1974), the Shuar (Gnerre 1986) and the Trio (Carlin 2004), the appreciation of rhetorical skill as a requisite for leadership among the Mapuche, the distinction of female and masculine speech among the Karajá (Rodrigues 2004) and the Chiquitano (Galeote 1993), the associ- ation of language choice and family lineage among the peoples of the Vaupés region (Sorensen 1967; Aikhenvald 2002), and the association of language choice and professional occupation in highland Bolivia (Howard 1995) appear to indicate an awareness of linguistic functionality not limited to daily communication alone.
    [Show full text]
  • A Grammar of Aguaruna
    A Grammar of Aguaruna Simon E. Overall M.A. (Hons) A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research Centre for Linguistic Typology La Trobe University Bundoora, Victoria, 3086 Australia December 2007 SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................................. XVI STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ........................................................................................................... XVI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.......................................................................................................................XVII CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED.............................................................................................................. XVIII ABBREVIATIONS USED............................................................................................................................XX MAP ............................................................................................................................................................XXII CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................1 1.1 LINGUISTIC PROFILE .........................................................................................................................1 1.1.1 Autodenomination .......................................................................................................................2
    [Show full text]
  • AN ANALYSIS of INTONATION PATTERNS in ECUADORIAN CUENCANO SPANISH: a SP Tobi DESCRIPTION
    AN ANALYSIS OF INTONATION PATTERNS IN ECUADORIAN CUENCANO SPANISH: A SP_ToBI DESCRIPTION A Thesis submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Linguistics and Religious Studies University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Alex Portocarrero Alex Portocarrero, November, 2019. All Rights Reserved PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. DISCLAIMER The thesis was exclusively created to meet the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Saskatchewan. Reference in this thesis to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the University of Saskatchewan.
    [Show full text]
  • Typological and Social Constraints on Language Contact
    TYPOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS ON LANGUAGE CONTACT AMERINDIAN LANGUAGES IN CONTACT WITH SPANISH VOLUME I Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6006 Janskerkhof 13 fax: +31 30 253 6406 3512 BL Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustrations: The Building of the Babel Tower by Pieter Bruegel (1563); Guaraní Indians by Ulrico Schmidl (1599, plates 6 and 11); Columbus’s Second Voyage, Anonymous (1584). ISBN 978-90-78328-62-9 NUR 616 Copyright © 2008: Jorge Gómez Rendón. All rights reserved. Typological and social constraints on language contact Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish VOLUME I ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel der Universiteit op donderdag 2 oktober 2008, te 12.00 uur door Jorge Arsenio Gómez Rendón Quito, Ecuador Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. Dr. P.C. Hengeveld Copromotor: Dr. D. Bakker Overige leden: Prof. Dr. P. Muysken Prof. Dr. T. H. Stolz Prof. Dr. W. Dietrich Prof. Dr. M. A. Woidich Dr. U. Ansaldo Dr. E. Hekking Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Universiteit van Amsterdam Para mis padres, Arsenio y Edith vii CONTENTS Volume I INTRODUCTION 1 PART I. THE THEORY 5 1 Taking a stand 7 1.1 On language and theories 8 1.2 The structure of this book 8 2 Views on language contact 11 2.1 What is language contact? 12 2.2 Communities
    [Show full text]
  • Uva-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
    UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Typological and social constraints on language contact : Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish Gómez Rendón, J.A. Publication date 2008 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Gómez Rendón, J. A. (2008). Typological and social constraints on language contact : Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish. LOT. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:24 Sep 2021 &.2#0 W .,'1& Spanish is spoken today by 332 million people in Latin America, Europe and Africa. This number does not include 23 million speakers in 22 countries where the language is not official1. In geographical distribution Spanish is the fourth language after English, French and Russian.2 Varieties of Spanish are counted by dozens, perhaps even hundreds according to some authors (cf.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting
    FORESTS WITH HISTORY: EXPLORING THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE CREATION OF THE CORDILLERA AZUL NATIONAL PARK ON THE CHAZUTINO PEOPLE OF AMAZONIAN PERU By RAFAEL MENDOZA LOZANO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Rafael Mendoza Lozano 2 To my friends 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my family and friends and the institutions which have supported me. Their names are far too many to list on this page. The University of Florida provided me with a stimulating academic environment, professors, friends, and a place to call home; all of this made it possible to undertake this work. In the field, I was fortunate to be able to count on the genuine support and encouragement of a diverse array of people. Thank you all 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ 8 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 9 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................... 10 ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 12
    [Show full text]
  • Inga Rimakkuna: Indigenous Frontiers in the Pastaza Basin, Peru by ©2018 Joshua Homan M.A., University of Kansas, 2011 B.A., University of Kansas, 2006
    Inga Rimakkuna: Indigenous Frontiers in the Pastaza Basin, Peru By ©2018 Joshua Homan M.A., University of Kansas, 2011 B.A., University of Kansas, 2006 Submitted to the graduate degree program in Anthropology and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Chair: Bartholomew Dean Brent Metz John Hoopes Barney Warf Michael F. Brown Joane Nagel Date Defended: 4 December 2018 The dissertation committee for Joshua Homan certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Inga Rimakkuna: Indigenous Frontiers in the Pastaza Basin, Peru Chair: Bartholomew Dean Date Approved: 4 December 2018 ii Abstract This dissertation examines the lives of Inga-speaking indigenous peoples living in the Pastaza basin in the northern reaches of the Peruvian Amazon. Through an in-depth historical overview, I demonstrate how the imposition of Inga (a dialect of Quechua) by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century acted as a means of binding multiple indigenous groups together within the mission system. Drawing on historical documents from the Jesuit Era through the 20th century, I detail the ethnogenesis of the Inga-speaking peoples in relation to other groups within the region. Rather than focusing on a singular, bounded ethnic group as has often been the case in Amazonia, I explore ongoing processes of ethnogenesis—of becoming Inga—using several crucial ethnographic tropes, such as kinship, marriage, shamanism, politics, and community foundation. I demonstrate the fluidity of identities in the indigenous frontiers of the Pastaza basin, at the margins of indigenous territories, problematizing traditional understandings of indigenous sociality in Amazonia.
    [Show full text]
  • Researchonline@JCU
    ResearchOnline@JCU This is the author-created version of the following work: Wojtylak, Katarzyna I. (2019) Traversing language barriers: 'Witoto' signal drums from Northwest Amazonia. International Journal of Language and Culture, 6 (1) pp. 196-217. Access to this file is available from: https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/53010/ © John Benjamins Publishing Company. This article is under copyright and the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Please refer to the original source for the final version of this work: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00022.woj Traversing language barriers: ‘Witoto’ signal drums from Northwest Amazonia Katarzyna I. Wojtylak Language and Culture Research Centre, James Cook University 1 The People of the Centre and the ‘Witoto’ Numerous cultural and linguistic areas have been recognized throughout Amazonia. They consist of related and unrelated ethnolinguistic groups which share common cultural and linguistic traits. Such areas include Upper Rio Negro, Vaupés, Guaporé-Mamoré, and Upper Xingu.1 The Caquetá-Putumayo (C-P) region, spanning across the Caquetá and Putumayo River Basins in southern Colombia and northern Peru, is an example of a cultural area. In the recent years, the C-P groups have become to be wider known as the People of the Centre (Echeverri, 1997).2 They form a ‘cultural complex’ that consists of eight dispersed ethnolinguistic groups that belong to three language families (Witotoan, Boran, and Arawak) plus one isolate (Andoke) (see Diagram 1). People of the Centre – Caquetá-Putumayo groups Witotoan Boran Arawak isolate Ocaina Nonuya ‘Witoto’ Bora Miraña Muinane Resígaro Andoke Murui Mɨka Minika Nɨpode Diagram 1.
    [Show full text]
  • A Typology of Stops in South American Indian Languages*
    A Typology of Stops in South American Indian languages* Hebe González University of Pittsburgh and Universidad Nacional de San Juan (Argentina) Keywords: Phonology, typology, stops, South America 1. INTRODUCTION This paper presents the first results of an ongoing research intended to examine the main ways in which the phonological systems of South American Indian Languages (SAIL) differ from each other. Specifically, it focus on the subsystem of both stops and affricates, as they are analyzed in regard to (i) their overall number within a phonological system, (ii) their series (e.g., voiceless, voiced, aspirated, ejective, and so on), (iii) the number of places of articulation where they are produced, as well as the most common ones, (iv) the interaction between the preferred places and the manners of articulation, and (v) their phonemic opposition. Finally, this paper discusses the most relevant allophonic variations that may give an indication of pervasive phonetic features found in languages belonging to different genetic units. The database is composed of 139 languages that belong to 59 genetic units as identified by Kaufman (1994).1 Languages are grouped according to two criteria: their genetic affiliation (i.e., linguistic family) and their geographic location, (following Kaufman’s division of South America into 12 cultural and ecological regions). The presence or absence of phonetic features (e.g., common allophonic variation of a particular phoneme) and phonemic oppositions between stops and affricates is studied for each language. The outcome is a picture of the genetic and geographic distribution of the features under investigation. * I wish to thank Terrence Kaufman for encouraging me to pursue this research and for his valuable comments and suggestions.
    [Show full text]
  • A Grammatical Description of Shiwiar Issue Date: 2020-06-29 11
    Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/123115 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Kohlberger, M. Title: A grammatical description of Shiwiar Issue Date: 2020-06-29 11 Chapter 2 2. The Shiwiar Language This chapter introduces the Shiwiar language. Section 2.1 is an outline of the most pervasive grammatical categories and structures found in Shiwiar, presented from a typological perspective. Areas of Shiwiar grammar which are cross-linguistically salient, rare or unique are highlighted throughout. The next two sections place Shiwiar in its wider historical and areal context. Section 2.2 describes the relationship between Shiwiar and its linguistic relatives, the four other Chicham languages. It also presents a summary of existing work on Chicham languages to date. Languages which are not related to Shiwiar but are spoken in the vicinity and have been in contact with Chicham languages are covered in §2.3. Section 2.4 discusses contact between Shiwiar and Spanish. Orthographic conventions are laid out in §2.5, including some of the historical and political considerations that are tied in with orthography and prescription. 2.1. Typological overview The Shiwiar language is spoken in an area between the northeastern foothills of the Andes Mountains and the northwestern edge of the Amazon Basin. Like many languages spoken in this intermediate region (see van Gijn 2014), Shiwiar exhibits typological features that are typical of both Andean and Amazonian languages. Shiwiar has 14 consonants and 8 vowels (four vowel qualities and an oral/nasal distinction). From a global typological perspective this is a relatively small phoneme inventory, but it is not unusual for languages of the area (cf.
    [Show full text]
  • Variability of the Chemical Composition of the Essential Oil from the Amazonian Ishpingo Species (Ocotea Quixos)
    molecules Article Variability of the Chemical Composition of the Essential Oil from the Amazonian Ishpingo Species (Ocotea quixos) Eduardo Valarezo * , Antoine Vullien and Dayra Conde-Rojas Departamento de Química, Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, Loja 110150, Ecuador; [email protected] (A.V.); [email protected] (D.C.-R.) * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +593-7-3701444 Abstract: Ocotea quixos (Lam.) Kosterm. is an aromatic tree native to Ecuador, whose leaves are used to prepare aromatic beverages to which different health benefits are attributed. In this study, Ocotea quixos leaves were collected in the Amazon region in different environmental conditions and subjected to hydrodistillation to isolate the essential oil. The collection variables used were type of soil, amount of shade, and height; in addition, the presence of twig and leaf age and moisture were used as variables. Chemical composition was analyzed by means of gas chromatography equipped with a flame ionization detector and gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. A wide variety of chemical compositions were detected in the samples. In total, forty-seven compounds were identified, which represented between 97.17% and 99.89% of the total composition. The constituents were mainly grouped into aliphatic sesquiterpene hydrocarbons (33.03–55.89%), other compounds (8.94–47.83%), and oxygenated monoterpenes (1.97–39.66%). The main constituents were found to be (E)-cinnamyl acetate (5.96–41.65%), (E)-methyl cinnamate (0.38–37.91%), and trans-caryophyllene (8.77–37.02%). The statistical analysis suggested the existence of two essential oil chemotypes and a direct correlation between environmental conditions and chemical composition of the essential oils.
    [Show full text]