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Te Ckunza of the Lickan Antai people inhabiting Chile, Bolivia and Argentina has been declared extinct. However, it is argued that reconstructing the elements of the grammar could facilitate its revitalization. Tis paper seeks to account for these elements in the ckunza of San Pedro de Atacama. To this end, a review of the phonetic, phonological, lexical, semantic, morphological and syntactic elements of the Amerindian language will be provided. Tis analysis also informs about the agglutinative characteristic of Ckunza. Te corpus of this research comes from the samples collected by the pioneers in its study. Te aim of this review is to show the grammar of Ckunza, since its reconstitution will provide the rules that will allow the creation of new sentences that will contribute to its revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of our investigation is the hypothesis that the non-standard Patagonian variety is made up not only of phonological, grammatical and lexical features, but also of oral interaction patterns which are essentially different from those used in urban societies. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday conversations from a socio-pragmatic approach, in order to give account of the relationship between this form of verbal exchange and the socio-cultural context where its production occurs. Our analysis is based on data collected during a field research carried on in two Mapuche-Tehuelche communities of the province of Chubut, in the Argentine Patagonia: Blancuntre and Cerro Centinela. Recorded spontaneous dialogues and personal interviews form the Corpus of analysis. The study focuses on the following structural constituents of conversation: pauses, silences and redundancy, within the frame of a theoretical pattern that allows us to identify a group of socio-demographic variables, which constraints the interacting behavior of the members of the investigated communities. The analysis of the collected corpus shows the relationship between conversational structures and strategies; and the Amerindian culture, where the interaction develops. The conclusion is that cultural diversity clearly emerges from the pragmatic level of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]