Maksymilian will document, describe, and analyze Cofán (A’ingae), an endangered, underdocumented, and critically understudied language isolate of an indigenous group native to the province Sucumbíos in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. With the goal of linguistic and cultural preservation in mind, he will (i) contribute new video and audio recordings to the archive of traditional and contemporary Cofán narratives to help capture the way the language is spoken today and build an accessible database for future generations of Cofán speakers and linguistic researchers, (ii) conduct linguistic elicitations on the manifold (heretofore unprobed) aspects of the Cofán grammar to improve our state-of-the-art description of the language, (iii) propose novel analyses for the empirical phenomena studied, and (iv) explore their potential implications for linguistic theory.

Advisors: Scott AnderBois (Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences) and Hugo Lucitante ‘19