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This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the  Endangered Languages Archive  and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.

Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019,  inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.

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Contributor biographies

Choguita elder †Luz Elena León Ramírez was a master storyteller and an invaluable source of linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge. She contributed many narratives to the corpus, including procedural texts, historical narratives, descriptions of culturally relevant events in the community, and personal history from her childhood. She also collaborated in elicitation sessions and translating and annotating her own and other language experts' texts.

Bertha Fuentes Loya has authored narratives, and has contributed to the corpus as a consultant for elicitation sessions and has collaborated in the annotation of texts recorded with other language experts. She has shared her expertise about variation between Choguita Rarámuri and neighboring Rarámuri varieties. She is also an expert seamstress and authored several narratives and procedural texts about her art

Sebastián Fuentes Holguín is a passionate advocate for the language and one of the main leaders of the community-based initiative to document the cultural, historical and linguistic heritage of Choguita. He has authored several monologic narratives and ceremonial speeches and has participated as consultant and teacher in elicitation sessions.

Abbreviations 
Acknowledgments 

1 Introduction 
1.1 Linguistic profile of Choguita Rarámuri 
1.1.1 Choguita Rarámuri in typological context 
1.1.2 Rarámuri language varieties and genetic/genealogical relationships 
1.1.3 Previous work 
1.2 Geographic location and physical environment 
1.3 Choguita Rarámuri in social and historical context 
1.3.1 History of contact with Europeans 
1.3.2 Linguistic ecology and sociopolitical context 
1.3.3 Mexican government sponsored “bilingual/bicultural” education and literacy 
1.4 This grammar
1.4.1 Project development
1.4.2 Theoretical assumptions
1.4.3 Data sources and methodology
1.4.4 Language experts and collaborators
1.4.5 Representation of examples
1.5 Overview of the grammar

2 Grammatical overview 
2.1 Phonology
2.1.1 Segmental inventory and processes 
2.1.2 Stress, tone and prosodic structure 
2.2 Pronouns and demonstratives 
2.3 Discourse particles 
2.4 Nouns and noun phrases 
2.5 Verbs 

2.6 Word order 
2.7 Appositive possessive constructions and relative clauses 
2.8 Complement clauses and clause chaining
2.9 Complex predicates 

3 Segmental phonology 
3.1 Overview of the Choguita Rarámuri phonological system 
3.2 Phonological inventory
3.2.1 Consonants 
3.2.2 Vowels 
3.3 Minimal pairs 
3.3.1 Consonant minimal pairs 
3.3.2 Vocalic minimal pairs
3.4 Processes
3.4.1 Palatalization of alveolar fricatives
3.4.2 Optional nasal place assimilation 
3.4.3 Processes targeting rhotics 
3.4.4 Post-consonantal devoicing 
3.4.5 Spirantization of voiced bilabial stops 
3.5 Phonetic reduction processes 
3.5.1 Lenition of voiceless plosives 
3.5.2 Depalatalization and deaffrication of alveopalatal affricates 

4 Syllables 
4.1 Underlying syllable structure 
4.2 Consonant sequences
4.3 Vowel sequences 
4.4 Semi-vowels 
4.4.1 Semi-vowel deletion 
4.4.2 Semi-vowel monophthongization 

5 Stress
5.1 Acoustic correlates and distributional properties
5.2 Stress-based vowel reduction and deletion 
5.2.1 Stress-conditioned vowel reduction patterns 
5.2.2 Stressed-conditioned vowel deletion 
5.3 Stress properties of roots and suffixes
5.3.1 Stress properties of monosyllabic roots
5.3.2 Stress properties of disyllabic roots
5.3.3 Stress properties of trisyllabic roots
5.3.4 Stress properties of suffixes
5.4 Initial three-syllable stress window

6 Tone and intonation
6.1 Tone
6.1.1 Tonal inventory
6.1.2 Tonal (near-)minimal pairs
6.1.3 Tone patterns by root type and stress position
6.1.4 Stress-based tonal neutralization
6.2 Intonation
6.2.1 H% boundary tones in declarative sentences
6.2.2 Optional rhythmic 'lead tones'
6.2.3 Intonation patterns of declarative sentences
6.2.4 Non-tonal encoding of intonation
6.2.5 Interrogative intonation

7 Other word-level supra-segmental processes 
7.1 Glottal stop: an initial disyllabic window
7.2 Minimality effects 
7.3 Loanword prosody 
7.3.1 Exceptionless prosodic loanword adaptation patterns 
7.3.2 Optional prosodic loanword adaptation patterns 

8 Nouns 
8.1 Morphotactic generalizations
8.2 Plural/pluractional marking 
8.3 Case marking 
8.3.1 Instrumental case 
8.3.2 Locative case 
8.4 Possessive marking 
8.4.1 Alienable and inalienable possession 
8.4.2 Meronymic (part-whole) relationships 
8.5 Deverbal nouns 
8.5.1 Agentive, patientive and experiencer nominalizations 
8.5.2 Deverbal nouns with -ri 
8.6 Spanish noun loanwords 
8.7 Tone in morphologically complex nouns 

9 Verbs and the verbal complex 
9.1 Verbal root classes 
9.1.1 The contrast between stressed and unstressed roots 
9.1.2 Stress-shifting and stress-neutral constructions across Uto-Aztecan 
9.1.3 The interaction of shifting and neutral morphologicalconstructions: stress and vocalic alternations 

9.1.4 Lexical tone in lexically stressed and unstressed verbs 
9.1.5 Valence alternations 
9.1.6 Change-of-state predicates 
9.1.7 Summary 
9.2 The role of tone in verbal morphology 
9.2.1 Lexical tones of suffixes 
9.2.2 Tone as realizational morphology 
9.2.3 Morphologically-conditioned tone 
9.2.4 Alternating tone stems 
9.2.5 Summary
9.3 The Inner Stem: noun incorporation, non-concatenative morphology and unproductive processes 
9.3.1 Non-concatenative processes 
9.3.2 Instrumental prefixes 
9.3.3 Body-part incorporation 
9.3.4 Suppletion and prefixation in pluractional marking 
9.3.5 Denominal verbs
9.3.6 Summary 
9.4 Verbal structure and verbal domains 
9.4.1 Overview 
9.4.2 Morphotactic evidence for affix ordering generalizations 
9.4.3 Phonological transparency and morpheme boundary strength 
9.5 The verbal complex: clitics and modal particles 
9.6 Summary 

10 Minor word classes 
10.1 Pronouns 
10.1.1 Personal pronouns 
10.1.2 Pronominal enclitics 
10.1.3 Emphatic pronouns
10.1.4 Interrogative pronouns and phrases 

11.5 Prosodic constraints on morphological shapes 
11.5.1 Truncation in body-part incorporation 
11.5.2 Truncation in denominal verb constructions in -ta 
11.5.3 Truncation in aspect/mood marking constructions 
11.5.4 Prosodic templates in Choguita Rarámuri 

12 Noun phrases 
12.1 Simple noun phrases
12.1.1 Demonstratives 
12.1.2 Definite articles 
12.1.3 Numerals 
12.1.4 Quantifiers 
12.1.5 Adjectives 
12.2 Complex noun phrases: Possessive constructions 
12.2.1 Nominal possessors 
12.2.2 Pronominal possessors 
12.2.3 Appositive possessive constructions 

13 Basic clause types 
13.1 Verbal clauses 
13.1.1 Basic clause types and transitivity properties 
13.1.2 Intransitive clauses 
13.1.3 Transitive clauses 
13.1.4 Ditransitive clauses 
13.2 Locative, copula and existential clauses 
13.2.1 Types of copulas 
13.2.2 Clauses headed by nominal predicates 
13.2.3 Clauses headed by locative predicates 
13.2.4 Existential clauses expressing predicate possession 

14 Sentence types 
14.1 Declarative sentences 
14.2 Interrogative constructions 
14.2.1 Polar questions 
14.2.2 Content questions 
14.3 Negation 
14.3.1 Negative free forms 
14.3.2 Clausal negation 
14.3.3 Constituent negation 
14.3.4 Negative existential and locative clauses 
14.4 Imperatives 
14.4.1 Positive imperative 
14.4.2 Prohibitive 
14.4.3 Exhortative 
14.4.4 Motion Imperatives 
14.5 Comparatives 

15 Complex clauses and complex predication 
15.1 Complement clauses 
15.1.1 Finite complement clauses with complementizer 
15.1.2 Interrogative complement clauses 
15.1.3 Asyndetic finite verb complement constructions
15.1.4 Reduced complement clauses 
15.1.5 Indirect causative construction 
15.1.6 Switch reference in reportative clauses 
15.1.7 Direct speech complements 
15.2 Adverbial clauses 
15.2.1 Conditional clauses 
15.2.2 Purpose clauses 
15.2.3 Reason clauses 
15.2.4 Locative adverbial clauses 
15.2.5 Temporal clauses 
15.2.6 Manner clauses 
15.3 Relative clauses 
15.3.1 Relative clauses via nominalization 
15.3.2 Relative clauses via finite clauses 
15.4 Coordination 
15.4.1 Conjunction 
15.4.2 Disjunction 
15.4.3 Adversative conjunction 
15.5 Verbal chaining structures 
15.6 Complex predicates 
15.6.1 Light verb constructions 
15.6.2 Auxiliary verb constructions 
15.6.3 Serial verb constructions 
15.6.4 V-V incorporation (secondary verb constructions) 

Appendix A: Verbal suffixes 
A.1 The Derived Stem: inchoative and transitivity markers 
A.1.1 Inchoative -bá 
A.1.2 Transitive -nâ 
A.1.3 Pluractional transitive -tʃa 
A.1.4 Transitive -bû 
A.2 The Syntactic Stem: causative and applicative markers 
A.2.1 Applicatives 
A.2.2 Causative -ti 
A.2.3 Applicative -ki 
A.3 The Aspectual Stem: desiderative, associated motion and evidential markers
A.3.1 Desiderative -nále 
A.3.2 Associated motion -simi 
A.3.3 Auditory evidential -tʃane 
A.4 The Finite Verb: voice, tense, aspect and mood markers 
A.4.1 Passive 
A.4.2 Future 
A.4.3 Motion imperative -mê
A.4.4 Conditional -sâ
A.4.5 Irrealis
A.4.6 Potential -râ
A.4.7 Imperative
A.4.8 Reportative
A.4.9 Past -li
A.4.10 Past egophoric -ki 
A.4.11 Imperfective -e 
A.4.12 Progressive -a 
A.4.13 Indirect causative nula 
A.5 The Subordinate Verb: deverbal morphology
A.5.1 Temporal -tʃi 
A.5.2 Epistemic -o 
A.5.3 Gerund -ká 
A.5.4 Purposive -ra 
A.5.5 Participial -ame

References 633

Contents

Index 
Name index
Language index