A description of Naso verbal art

This dissertation is an analytic description of aspects of Naso speech play and verbal art. It employs intersecting methodologies of language documentation and description, ethnography, and speaker intuitions. Naso is a Chibchan language spoken in Panama by approximately 500 fluent individuals, and its speakers are shifting to primary use of the Spanish language at an accelerated pace. Speech play and verbal art are used by Nasos in ways that index their social identities and relationships with life forms and political structures, as well as how they interpret the vitality of their language and culture. Linguistic strategies used in speech play and verbal art include cross-linguistically common processes such as high pitch, vowel lengthening, and use of creaky voice and other voice qualities. They also include typologically unique strategies such as the distortion of sibilant consonants, vowel lowering, and idiomatic tags which set up humorous frames of interaction, such as one in which interlocutors are addressed in the third person. The more complex strategies of verbal art build from speech play, and include common resources such as anecdotes, myths, and song. The unique genres of Naso verbal art include tjlõkwo rong ‘profound words’, which formally resemble the parallel poetic couplet difrasismos widespread across the greater geographical region of Mesoamerica. I show how these specific speech play and verbal art strategies are employed in social exercises of the imagination and creativity surrounding two themes of Naso lifeː recreation, and nostalgia. Analysis of specific texts in context reveals that Naso speakers index their complex identities, including their indigeneity, through ‘profound words’ embedded in nostalgic rumination, and they index their agility, wit, and self-teasing traits in humorous or recreational interactions. The nostalgic function of ‘profound words’ is analyzed as working through principles of ambiguity and vagueness—mechanisms which explain cases of verbal art that younger generations identify productively. This dissertation directly portrays native speaker intuitions of verbal art through quoted monologues that guide the preface of each chapter. Besides being informed by creative Naso individuals as well as prevalent Naso socio-cultural views, the dissertation takes areal-comparative and typological perspectives, demonstrating the theoretical contribution of speech play and verbal art more broadly to linguistics and the humanistic study of society.Linguistic