‘With One LIP, with Two Lips’: Parallelism in Nahuatl

Texts in Classical Nahuatl of the year 1524, in the genre of formal oratory, reveal extensive use of lines showing parallel morphosyntactic and semantic structure; this parallelism expresses likeness rather than contrast, and is organized in binary sequences which display successive embedding. Analysis and translation of an extended passage point to (a) the applicability of structural analysis to ‘expressive’ as well as ‘referential’ texts; and (b) the importance of understanding oral literatures not just in terms imposed by translators, but in the light of their inherent esthetic principles.

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Type: Research Article
Information: Language , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 437 - 452

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/414607 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © 1990 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

This represents the author's Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC, December 1989. Thanks for stimuli and suggestions go to Robert Austerlitz, Lyle Campbell, Dell Hymes, Frances Karttunen, Jorge Klor de Alva, Lise Menn, Juan Pascoe, Joel Sherzer, and Tony Woodbury.

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‘With One LIP, with Two Lips’: Parallelism in Nahuatl

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