Naming Strategies and Ethnobiological Nomenclature in Kakataibo (Panoan, Peru)

The present paper describes and illustrates the main naming strategies attested in a lexical database of 1233 Kakataibo names of plant and animals. Seven naming strategies are proposed for Kakataibo ethnobiological nomenclature: coining, morphological derivation, borrowing, ethnobiological polysemy, compounding and grammatical nominalization (the latter two being exclusively associated with lexically complex forms). Kakataibo ethnobiological terminology overally follows the general word-formation patterns available in the language, but it will be argued that some types of compounds and grammatical nominalizations found in the database are constraint to names of plants and animal. Indeed, one particular type of lexicalized grammatical nominalization seems to be cross-linguistically unusual.