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In this paper I present the types of nominalization in Kakua, a language spoken by a group of hunter-gatherer peoples from the small Kakua-Nukakan family, inhabitants of the Vaupés area in eastern Colombia. I argue that the nominalization strategies in Kakua have developed from a traceable typical Kakua-Nukakan strategy, into a more Vaupés-like profile of expressing nominalizations, where Kakua had added more nominalization strategies in order for the language to adapt to the types of nominalizations found in many of Kakua's neighboring languages in the Vaupés area. For this, I will first give a description of the nominalization strategies in Kakua, to later compare them to the nominalization strategies in Nukak, Kakua's sister language spoken outside of the Vaupés area. The paper concludes with a comparison of nominalization in Kakua and the nominalization strategies found in the surrounding languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the discussion of Amazonian systems of nominal classification by providing the first description of the system of Uitoto, spoken in the Colombian Amazon. Two gender markers and a set of more than 100 classifiers, most of them denoting physical properties, are described with respect to their distribution and eventual patterns of agreement, their degree of grammaticalization, and their discursive function. Special attention is given to the relation between classifiers and nouns and to the formation of pro-forms with classifiers, stressing the importance of classifiers in the lexical genesis of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]