Content area
Abstract
The Pilagá language or Pitelasa laqtaq (Guaykuruan family, Southern Guaykuruan branch) has approximately 4,000 speakers who live in lowland South America, a region known as Gran Chaco. Pilagá communities are only found in northeastern Argentina (Province of Formosa). When my research on Pilagá started, there was extremely little published work and no comprehensive grammars of this language, nor did dictionaries exist up to that point.
This dissertation is intended to fill a gap in our knowledge of Guaykuruan languages, by providing a description of the Pilagá language based on extensive field work. The first two introductory chapters describe the Pilagá people and communities, and research prior to this dissertation. The next eight chapters constitute the linguistic analysis. Chapter 3 describes segmental and suprasegmental phonology, providing a basis for the morphological description of nouns and verbs. Three chapters cover verb morphology. The last four chapters are dedicated to syntactic issues. A number of diachronic hypotheses are added to the presentation of the topics; however, the synchronic approach to the language is always the primary goal.
