River thinking: Arawakan and Pano-Tacanan in the Upper Amazon Transition Area

Abstract

This paper studies whether being present in communities belonging to a particular river system influences the structural make up of languages spoken on the Upper Amazon (UA), combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The UA has many rivers that spring in the Andes and further east join the Amazon. We have coded 76 languages for 23 features (phonology, syntax). Both phylogeny and river system can be taken into account, and phylogeny is overall a better predictor for the characters studied. However, a number of innovations within specific phylogenies in Arawakan and Pano-Tacanan can be accounted for as influence of the river system where a language is spoken.