Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

Páez, also known as Nasa Yuwe, is spoken in the southwestern regions of Columbia, by most of the ethnic population of almost 140,000. Three quarters of this population are bilingual in Páez and Spanish and one quarter is monolingual in Páez. Ingrid Jung provides a short history of the Páez people in the introduction (13–29), including an examination of the impact of a sixteenth century Spanish conquest on the language. What follows is a concise discussion of the still unsettled question of the wider affiliation of the language, in particular, whether Páez is an isolate language or a member of a wider Macro-Chibchan grouping.

Ch. 1 presents a fairly detailed description of the phonology and phonological processes of Páez. This chapter concludes with a brief overview and comparative chart of the various orthographies used in writing the language. There are vowel and consonant charts as well as lists of words showing phonological contrasts.

Ch. 2 discusses the theoretical model (dependency grammar) used in the analysis of the morphosyntactic structure of the language. In Ch. 3, J’s focus is on describing the verbs. Her discussion of the interrelationship between aspect, tense, and mood is conducted with reference to Bernard Comrie’s Aspect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The theoretical discussion of aspect and tense concludes that only aspect is morphologically indicated, while tense is derived from aspectual distinctions.

Ch. 4 is on nouns, where the distinction of nouns from verbs is based on their syntactic functioning in a sentence as subject and object by the fact that nouns cannot be modified aspectually. However, some nouns can be transformed into verbs by derivational means. The function of a noun in the sentence as topic or theme and its semantic-role relationship to the verb are indicated either by syntactic position or by suffixation. The category of plural is marked morphologically only in the dative case by a characteristic suffix. When a noun is the subject of a sentence, the plurality of the referents is indicated by the portmanteau form of the verb ending. Páez pronouns, as discussed in Ch. 5, distinguish masculine and feminine in the first person singular and in the second person singular and plural.

Adjectives are introduced in Ch. 6. Here the discussion centers around the establishment of a separate class of words on morphosyntactic grounds or whether adjectives are a subclass of verbs, since they can occur with some suffixes associated with verbs. J seems to consider adjectives to be an intermediate word class between nouns and verbs, sharing some morphological or syntactic features with both basic word classes.

A brief chapter (Ch. 7) discusses phrases. This is followed in the next two units by longer analyses of sentence subordination (Ch. 8) and coordination (Ch.9). The next unit (Ch. 10) discusses interrogative sentences and the final syntactic chapter deals with negation (Ch. 11). Two short texts, with glosses and translation, are given in an appendix. A comprehensive bibliography finishes the book.

This volume is a valuable contribution to the ongoing and urgent documentation of the native languages of South America, a large number of which have become extinct before any linguistically sophisticated descriptions, as is J’s grammar, were written and published.