Simeon Floyd
Biographic Data
| ID | 78388 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simeon Floyd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simeon |
| FAMILY NAME | Floyd |
| SIGNATURE | FLOYD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidad San Francisco de Quito |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9739-2914 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Realidad y fantasías en la toponimia pre-kichwa ecuatoriana
En la región andina del Ecuador existen miles de nombres de lugares, o “topónimos”, que no pueden ser interpretados a través del kichwa, la lengua indígena más hablada actualmente en la sierra, introducida por los incas y difundida durante la colonia española. Estos nombres se interpretan mejor a través de las lenguas barbacoas, habladas hoy en la costa, lo que sugiere que las lenguas históricas perdidas como el pasto, caranqui, panzaleo, puruhá …
Multimodal Existential Negation in Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa
Conventionalized or symbolic "emblematic" visual expressions are the types of "gesture" that most closely resemble lexical and grammatical elements seen in spoken languages or in sign languages in the visual modality. The relationship between conventionalization in the visual modality and in morphosyntax is a topic that remains only partially explored, with more research focused on iconic and indexical aspects of visual expression than on symboli…
Ecuadorian Quechua and Quechuan classification
According to the traditional Quechuan classification which has dominated Andean historical linguistics since the 1960s, the Ecuadorian Quechua group (Andean Quichua, Amazonian Quichua, Colombian Ingano, and lower Pastaza Inga in Peru) belongs to the “Quechua II” branch, supposedly including all northern and southern Quechuas, and to the “Quechua IIB” sub-branch, said to also include the Chachapoyas-Lamas Quechua group and the “coastal” Quechua do…
Cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? Una estimación del número de lenguas quechuas
Si la práctica de referir a una sola “lengua quechua” es incorrecta porque ello no reconoce las distintas “lenguas quechuas” habladas en los países andinos, entonces, ¿cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? En este trabajo, se propone una cantidad aproximada basada en una aplicación a la literatura quechuista de los criterios más relevantes para la distinción lengua/dialecto: (1) grado de intercomprensión, (2) cercanía fonológica-morfosintáctica,(3) corre…
Ecuadorian Highland Quichua and the Lost Languages of the Northern Andes
In the early Spanish colonial period, the territory of Quito underwent a large-scale shift from multiple pre-Incan languages to a Quechuan language first introduced by the Incas and then adopted by the Spanish as the general language of colonial society. This article considers the evidence that these languages left linguistic effects that can still be detected in modern Ecuadorian Highland Quichua, contributing a large lexicon of non-Quechuan top…
Oclusivas complejas en el quechua de Domingo de Santo Tomás
Tradicionalmente, el quechua descrito por Domingo de Santo Tomás en 1560 se ha contrastado con el quechua cuzqueño por la ausencia de una representación ortográfica para oclusivas complejas y por la presencia de sonorización posnasal de oclusivas escrita como , y . Previamente no ha sido posible explicar por qué el autor escribe estas letras con aparente irregularidad, usándolas en algunos casos, pero usando , y en otros. Este estudio demuestra q…
Conversation and Culture
Conversation analysis is a method for the systematic study of interaction in terms of a sequential turn-taking system. Research in conversation analysis has traditionally focused on speakers of English, and it is still unclear to what extent the system observed in that research applies to conversation more generally around the world. However, as this method is now being applied to conversation in a broader range of languages, it is increasingly p…
Subject and Topic
The concept of subject and the related concept of topic each refers to a different aspect of what linguistic units (phrases, sentences, utterances) are primarily “about.” While these terms have proven fruitful over the years for understanding many linguistic phenomena, at the same time they have been found to be difficult to define in a robust cross‐linguistic sense that fully reflects the diversity of the world's languages, and in some cases the…
Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for social action
Evidentiality and flexibility of source reporting
The reporting of the sources of our statements—whether we have, e.g., seen something or been told something—plays an important role in communication. The inaccurate reporting of sources is often associated with the spread of inaccurate beliefs, as when rumors are attributed to a non-existent credible source. Experiments have revealed that participants display a substantial amount of flexibility in the reporting of sources, in particular by attrib…
Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse
This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-direc…
Tools from the Ethnography of Communication for Language Documentation
Documentary linguistics is increasingly responsible for documenting not just the grammatical aspects of endangered languages but the sociocultural contexts where they are spoken. An approach called the "ethnography of communication" developed by Dell Hymes in the 1960s offers ethnographic tools that apply specifically to the communicative practices in "speech events," a key concept in this approach. Hymes created the SPEAKING model, which reminds…
Smell Is Coded in Grammar and Frequent in Discourse: Cha'palaa Olfactory Language in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua an…
Evidentiality and interrogativity
Place reference in story beginnings: A cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances
People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the …
Timing of Visual Bodily Behavior in Repair Sequences: Evidence From Three Languages
This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation-when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk-into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a "hold"-when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfull…
Modally hybrid grammar: Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú
From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as 'gestural' and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to …
Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world's languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of 'other-initiated repair…
Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and co…
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
Poeticas de vida en espacios de muerte: Género, poder y estado en la contidianeidad warao [Poetics of life in spaces of death: Gender, power and the state in Warao everyday life] by Charles L. Briggs
No abstract is available for this article
Re-discovering the Quechua adjective
This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. I…
The Pirate Media Economy and the Emergence of Quichua Language Media Spaces in Ecuador
This paper gives an account of the pirate media economy of Ecuador and its role in the emergence of indigenous Quichua-language media spaces, identifying the different parties involved in this economy, discussing their relationship to the parallel "legitimate" media economy, and considering the implications of this informal media market for Quichua linguistic and cultural reproduction. As digital recording and playback technology has become incre…
Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change
2007). Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 111-140
Evidentiality and interrogativity
Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for social action
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
Timing of Visual Bodily Behavior in Repair Sequences: Evidence From Three Languages
This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation-when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk-into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a "hold"-when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfull…
Modally hybrid grammar: Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú
From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as 'gestural' and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to …
Smell Is Coded in Grammar and Frequent in Discourse: Cha'palaa Olfactory Language in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua an…
Place reference in story beginnings: A cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances
People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the …
Ecuadorian Highland Quichua and the Lost Languages of the Northern Andes
In the early Spanish colonial period, the territory of Quito underwent a large-scale shift from multiple pre-Incan languages to a Quechuan language first introduced by the Incas and then adopted by the Spanish as the general language of colonial society. This article considers the evidence that these languages left linguistic effects that can still be detected in modern Ecuadorian Highland Quichua, contributing a large lexicon of non-Quechuan top…
Conversation and Culture
Conversation analysis is a method for the systematic study of interaction in terms of a sequential turn-taking system. Research in conversation analysis has traditionally focused on speakers of English, and it is still unclear to what extent the system observed in that research applies to conversation more generally around the world. However, as this method is now being applied to conversation in a broader range of languages, it is increasingly p…
The Pirate Media Economy and the Emergence of Quichua Language Media Spaces in Ecuador
This paper gives an account of the pirate media economy of Ecuador and its role in the emergence of indigenous Quichua-language media spaces, identifying the different parties involved in this economy, discussing their relationship to the parallel "legitimate" media economy, and considering the implications of this informal media market for Quichua linguistic and cultural reproduction. As digital recording and playback technology has become incre…
Cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? Una estimación del número de lenguas quechuas
Si la práctica de referir a una sola “lengua quechua” es incorrecta porque ello no reconoce las distintas “lenguas quechuas” habladas en los países andinos, entonces, ¿cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? En este trabajo, se propone una cantidad aproximada basada en una aplicación a la literatura quechuista de los criterios más relevantes para la distinción lengua/dialecto: (1) grado de intercomprensión, (2) cercanía fonológica-morfosintáctica,(3) corre…
Re-discovering the Quechua adjective
This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. I…
Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse
This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-direc…
Tools from the Ethnography of Communication for Language Documentation
Documentary linguistics is increasingly responsible for documenting not just the grammatical aspects of endangered languages but the sociocultural contexts where they are spoken. An approach called the "ethnography of communication" developed by Dell Hymes in the 1960s offers ethnographic tools that apply specifically to the communicative practices in "speech events," a key concept in this approach. Hymes created the SPEAKING model, which reminds…
Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change
2007). Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 111-140
Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change
2007). Changing Times and Local Terms on the Rio Negro, Brazil: Amazonian Ways of Depolarizing Epistemology, Chronology and Cultural Change. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 111-140
The Pirate Media Economy and the Emergence of Quichua Language Media Spaces in Ecuador
This paper gives an account of the pirate media economy of Ecuador and its role in the emergence of indigenous Quichua-language media spaces, identifying the different parties involved in this economy, discussing their relationship to the parallel "legitimate" media economy, and considering the implications of this informal media market for Quichua linguistic and cultural reproduction. As digital recording and playback technology has become incre…
Re-discovering the Quechua adjective
This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. I…
Poeticas de vida en espacios de muerte: Género, poder y estado en la contidianeidad warao [Poetics of life in spaces of death: Gender, power and the state in Warao everyday life] by Charles L. Briggs
No abstract is available for this article
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world's languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of 'other-initiated repair…
Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and co…
Timing of Visual Bodily Behavior in Repair Sequences: Evidence From Three Languages
This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation-when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk-into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a "hold"-when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfull…
Modally hybrid grammar: Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú
From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as 'gestural' and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to …
Evidentiality and interrogativity
Place reference in story beginnings: A cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances
People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the …
Tools from the Ethnography of Communication for Language Documentation
Documentary linguistics is increasingly responsible for documenting not just the grammatical aspects of endangered languages but the sociocultural contexts where they are spoken. An approach called the "ethnography of communication" developed by Dell Hymes in the 1960s offers ethnographic tools that apply specifically to the communicative practices in "speech events," a key concept in this approach. Hymes created the SPEAKING model, which reminds…
Smell Is Coded in Grammar and Frequent in Discourse: Cha'palaa Olfactory Language in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua an…
Evidentiality and flexibility of source reporting
The reporting of the sources of our statements—whether we have, e.g., seen something or been told something—plays an important role in communication. The inaccurate reporting of sources is often associated with the spread of inaccurate beliefs, as when rumors are attributed to a non-existent credible source. Experiments have revealed that participants display a substantial amount of flexibility in the reporting of sources, in particular by attrib…
Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse
This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-direc…
Subject and Topic
The concept of subject and the related concept of topic each refers to a different aspect of what linguistic units (phrases, sentences, utterances) are primarily “about.” While these terms have proven fruitful over the years for understanding many linguistic phenomena, at the same time they have been found to be difficult to define in a robust cross‐linguistic sense that fully reflects the diversity of the world's languages, and in some cases the…
Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for social action
Oclusivas complejas en el quechua de Domingo de Santo Tomás
Tradicionalmente, el quechua descrito por Domingo de Santo Tomás en 1560 se ha contrastado con el quechua cuzqueño por la ausencia de una representación ortográfica para oclusivas complejas y por la presencia de sonorización posnasal de oclusivas escrita como , y . Previamente no ha sido posible explicar por qué el autor escribe estas letras con aparente irregularidad, usándolas en algunos casos, pero usando , y en otros. Este estudio demuestra q…
Conversation and Culture
Conversation analysis is a method for the systematic study of interaction in terms of a sequential turn-taking system. Research in conversation analysis has traditionally focused on speakers of English, and it is still unclear to what extent the system observed in that research applies to conversation more generally around the world. However, as this method is now being applied to conversation in a broader range of languages, it is increasingly p…
Ecuadorian Highland Quichua and the Lost Languages of the Northern Andes
In the early Spanish colonial period, the territory of Quito underwent a large-scale shift from multiple pre-Incan languages to a Quechuan language first introduced by the Incas and then adopted by the Spanish as the general language of colonial society. This article considers the evidence that these languages left linguistic effects that can still be detected in modern Ecuadorian Highland Quichua, contributing a large lexicon of non-Quechuan top…
Ecuadorian Quechua and Quechuan classification
According to the traditional Quechuan classification which has dominated Andean historical linguistics since the 1960s, the Ecuadorian Quechua group (Andean Quichua, Amazonian Quichua, Colombian Ingano, and lower Pastaza Inga in Peru) belongs to the “Quechua II” branch, supposedly including all northern and southern Quechuas, and to the “Quechua IIB” sub-branch, said to also include the Chachapoyas-Lamas Quechua group and the “coastal” Quechua do…
Cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? Una estimación del número de lenguas quechuas
Si la práctica de referir a una sola “lengua quechua” es incorrecta porque ello no reconoce las distintas “lenguas quechuas” habladas en los países andinos, entonces, ¿cuántas lenguas quechuas hay? En este trabajo, se propone una cantidad aproximada basada en una aplicación a la literatura quechuista de los criterios más relevantes para la distinción lengua/dialecto: (1) grado de intercomprensión, (2) cercanía fonológica-morfosintáctica,(3) corre…
Realidad y fantasías en la toponimia pre-kichwa ecuatoriana
En la región andina del Ecuador existen miles de nombres de lugares, o “topónimos”, que no pueden ser interpretados a través del kichwa, la lengua indígena más hablada actualmente en la sierra, introducida por los incas y difundida durante la colonia española. Estos nombres se interpretan mejor a través de las lenguas barbacoas, habladas hoy en la costa, lo que sugiere que las lenguas históricas perdidas como el pasto, caranqui, panzaleo, puruhá …
Multimodal Existential Negation in Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa
Conventionalized or symbolic "emblematic" visual expressions are the types of "gesture" that most closely resemble lexical and grammatical elements seen in spoken languages or in sign languages in the visual modality. The relationship between conventionalization in the visual modality and in morphosyntax is a topic that remains only partially explored, with more research focused on iconic and indexical aspects of visual expression than on symboli…
Linguistics (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Communication (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works)