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Speakers of Nanti, an Arawak language of southeastern Peru, perform an extemporaneous yet metrically rigorous genre of verbal art called karintaa. This talk describes the formal characteristics of this remarkable poetic genre and explores its implications for theoretical models of poetic well-formedness, and for typologies of poetic form and composition.

 

Nanti karintaa exhibits seven mora lines, and chanters rely on several morphophonological manipulation strategies, including vowel lengthening, partial syllable reduplication, and vocable cliticization, to extemporaneously produce well-formed lines in intense dialogic poetic exchanges. These strategies serve to transform the moraic quantity of the line from that given by its basic lexical content to that required by the prosodic constraints of the genre.

 

I show that the well-formedness Nanti karintaa chants is not easily accounted for by models developed for European poetic genres (Hayes 2009), since these rely on the parallel evaluations of verse forms against constraints in distinct prosodic and phonological components, guaranteeing that genre-specific phonological processes are not triggered or blocked by the prosodic requirements of the genre. Karintaa composition, however, makes central use of morphophonological processes whose variable employment can be predicted by whether they contribute to well-formed lines or not. This behavior requires a model in which genre-specific phonological and prosodic constraints are integrated in a single component, allowing poetic strategies to be triggered or blocked by karintaa-specific prosodic requirements. I discuss the implications of this formal difference for typologies of poetic form and composition, drawing a basic distinction between 'lexical selection genres' (e.g. English iambic pentameter) and 'morphophonological manipulation' genres (e.g. Nanti karintaa and others).