Mochica: Grammatical topics and external relations

This thesis is about the Mochica language, an extinct linguistic isolate that was spoken until the mid- to late-nineteenth century in the northern coastal area of Peru. The aim of this study is twofold. The first goal is to reconstruct and better understand the Mochica language, in order to achieve the second goal of this research: a comparison of the Mochica language with other languages, which could potentially allow the establishment of contact or genealogical relations.This thesis includes a brief grammatical sketch of the Mochica language, as well as the reconstruction of some of its grammatical aspects (nominal possession, numeral classification, and nominalization) and its phonology. The thesis also offers the results of the grammatical and lexical comparison carried out between the Mochica language and other surrounding languages, and with other typologically similar languages.This thesis will be of interest to linguists who study indigenous languages of the Americas, Andean Linguistics and Linguistic Typology.The research for this thesis was carried out as part of the project “The Linguistic Past of Mesoamerica and the Andes (Mesandlin(g)k)”, financed by the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 295918.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic