Serial Verbs and Event Plausibility in Tariana from Northwest Amazonia

A language is likely to bear an imprint of its speakers’ habitat and physical environment, their relationships to one another, and their beliefs and ways of viewing the world. Correlations between individual linguistic categories, cultural values, and social parameters have been the focus of a large body of work. As Enfield (2002a: 3) puts it, in his introduction to the area of “ethnosyntax,” “encoded in the semantics of grammar we find cultural values and ideas, we find clues about social structures which speakers maintain, we find evidence, both historically and otherwise, of the social organisation of speech communities.” Mutual co-dependence between the grammar of a language and the non-linguistic parameters of the society where it is spoken is at the core of the cultural linguistics, pioneered by Farzad Sharifian (e.g., Sharifian 2017).