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Mily Crevels
The purpose of this paper is to give a preliminary sketch of some interesting structural features of Itonama, a moribund indigenous language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, against the historic and sociolinguistic background of the area. Greenberg's (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a subbranch of Macro-Chibchan, has not been supported by other linguists and the language is still considered to be an isolate or rather an unclassified language. Itonama is a head-marking VSO language, which marks gender on the verb and distinguishes masculine and feminine gender in pronouns and demonstratives. It has a multiple classifier system and only two open word classes: verbs and nouns. While its nominal morphology seems quite transparent, the verbal morphology is much more complex with various prefix and suffix slots, verbal classifiers -which also appear on demonstratives-, body-part incorporation, and verbal number.
