Naming strategies and plant names structure in Urarina language

This paper constitutes the first detailed study of the botanical nomenclature in Urarina, an isolated Amazonian language spoken in Loreto, Peru. Based on the analysis of 166 plant names collected during fieldwork, the paper describes the main strategies that the Urarina language uses to name plants, as well as their structure and the semantic motivations underlying their form. As a result, a strong correlation between coining strategy and borrowing with simple lexemes was found, whereas compounding and nominalization strategies were found to be highly associated with complex lexemes. Furthermore, four structural patterns showing metaphoric and metonymic processes were identified for compounding, while three structural patterns were identified for nominalization. The latter are of particular concern for typological discussions about lexeme and phrase.