A Grammar of Araona, an Amazonian Language of Northwestern Bolivia

This dissertation is a comprehensive grammatical description of Araona, a Tacana language spoken in northwestern Bolivia (Amazonia) by about 150 people. This is the first comprehensive grammar of this language. It is primarily based on first-hand data collected in the Araona-speaking communities, during two fieldtrips of a total of 14 months. The grammar is cast in the framework of basic linguistic theory. It aims at covering most aspects of the language, with special attention to its typologically unusual features, such as case system, predicate structure, subclasses of verbs (inflecting, non-inflecting, and partially inflecting), complex predicates and transitivity agreement within them, and the system of personal pronouns. Araona is an agglutinative, predominantly suffixing and mildly polysynthetic language. The grammar consists of 26 chapters. It begins with two introductory chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Araona people, their lifestyle, beliefs, and current situation. Chapter 2 discusses the classification of the Araona language, and its typological features. Chapter 3 outlines the phonology of the language which is characterized by a relatively simple phoneme inventory on the one hand and complicated rules for stress assignment on the other hand.