Reviewed by Carolina González, Florida State University

Matis is a Panoan language spoken by 262 speakers in the Brazilian Amazon. This book provides a concise account of its morpho-syntactic characteristics following a descriptive and functional approach, and it updates some of the phonological information available for the language.

The book is organized in twelve chapters. Ch. 1 describes the situation of the Matis people and some sociolinguistic aspects. It refines Loos’ (1999) classification of Panoan by proposing a Mayoruna subgroup that includes Matis, Matsés, and other languages. The following chapter details the procedure of data collection and the analytical methodology employed. Ch. 3 consists of a brief overview of the phonology, taking Spanghero Ferreira (2000) as a point of departure. Most notably, it updates the number and type of phonemic contrasts for some consonants and vowels, provides more details about the stress system, and briefly covers some of the most common morpho-phonological processes.

Ch. 4 previews the morphology of Matisand introduces the phenomena of affixation, lexicalization, neologism formation, and suppletion. Ch. 5 covers nominal morphology and nominalization, while Ch. 6 focuses on verbs. Like other Panoan languages Matis is ergative, and transitivity conditions the distribution of several verbal morphemes. Intransitive verbs have one or two arguments in the absolutive, while transitive verbs have one ergative argument, two if they are ditransitive. The ergative-absolutive system of Matis is explored further in Ch. 10: nouns, numerals, and quantifiers take ergative suffixes, while the absolutive remains unmarked. In pronouns, the ergative-absolutive distinction is marked only in the singular form.

Adverbs and adverbials are the subject of Ch. 7, while the following two chapters discuss adjectives and the closed classes of pronouns, quantifiers, numerals, and interjections. Ch. 9 provides a general overview of the complex system of switch-reference, which is with the case system the central part of this study. At least eleven switch-reference morphemes that occur in simultaneous or sequential contexts are identified. The final chapter provides an overview of simple and complex sentences. F shows that the most common word order in Matis is agent-object-verb for transitive sentences and subject-verb for intransitives. The book closes with a brief summary of the main characteristics of Matis, a list of references, and two appendixes (a short lexicon and a transcribed text).

This volume is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation. Clearly written, it focuses primarily on the morphology of Matis and includes a wealth of examples. While the discussion of similarities with other Panoan languages, especially Matsés and Shipibo-Conibo, will interest researchers on Panoan languages and other indigenous languages of Brazil, the book will be of wider interest to typologists in general.

REFERENCES

LOOS, EUGENE. 1999. Pano. The Amazonian languages, ed by R.M.W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, 227–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SPANGHERO FERREIRA, VITÓRIA REGINA. 2000. Lingua matis (pano): Uma análise fonológica. Munich: Lincom Europa.