Between grammar and poetry : The structure of Nanti karintaa chants. In

The structure of verbal art and the grammar of everyday speech have been argued to be intimately related by scholars from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. A major theme in this line of research is that poetic forms are generated by the artistic redeployment of linguistic resources already present in the grammar of a language (Jakobson, 1968; Sherzer, 1990; Tannen 1989). This paper evaluates and explores this claim by examining the poetic structure of a particular verbal art form in relation to the grammar of the language spoken by its performers. The verbal art form I examine is karintaa, an extemporaneously composed poetic form performed by the Nantis of the Peruvian Amazon. Focusing on the phenomenon of vowel lengthening in these chants, I compare this prosodic phenomenon with the grammaticalized prosodic structure of everyday Nanti speech. To make my comparison maximally explicit, I adopt an optimality theoretic framework in which I take extemporaneous karintaa to be outputs of a canonical optimality-theoretic constraint system that serves to force inputs (which are everyday utterances) to more closely match the prosodic structure of th