Rosa Vallejos - The role of shape and animacy in nominal classification: evidence from the Amazon

Languages throughout the world have dedicated mechanisms to specify information about the shape, animacy, consistency, size, location, or utility of the entities around us. An important question in linguistics is to what extent the nominal classification system of a language mirrors the way speakers see the world they live in, and to what extent the documented similarities reflect underlying, general cognitive processes in the human mind. Thus, an adequate theory of human language requires a broad sampling of diverse languages. Amazonian languages have been identified as a priority in this respect, since they are both poorly documented and highly endangered - Rosa Vallejos | Professeur associé de linguistiques à l'University du Nouveau Mexique, Albuquerque, USA

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