Documenting Switch Reference in A’ingae
Scott AnderBois, Brown University
In this talk, I present an overview of the A’ingae Language Documentation Project, a collaborative project to document A’ingae (Cofán, ISO code: con), and isolate spoken by ~1,500 people in Amazonian Ecuador and Colombia. Our team is collecting an online corpus of annotated video and audio across different genres and topics and using this corpus as a resource to create pedagogical and other practical materials as well as answer scientific questions about the language. In addition to introducing the project, I will present a brief case study examining one such set of scientific questions concerning the distribution and function of so-called “switch reference” morphology in A’ingae. A’ingae possesses a set of two suffixes, -pa SS and -si DS, that indicate the identity or non-identity of a clause’s subject with that of an adjacent clause. Drawing on elicited data and data from our corpus, we argue for a semantic/pragmatic generalization of where these morphemes appear.