Finiteness in the indigenous languages of Lowland South America

Despite its standard use within linguistics, the notion of finiteness proves notoriously difficult to define cross-linguistically (cf. Eide, 2016; Joseph, 1983; Lowe, 2019; Ledgeway, 2007; Nikolaeva, 2007, a.o.). Or, as Klein (2006, p. 245) puts it: “the notion of finiteness is used by everybody and understood by nobody.” It has been questioned “whether it is altogether a universally valid concept” (Nikolaeva, 2007, p. 3); some have even concluded that finiteness is “of limited cross-linguistic applicability” (Cristofaro, 2003, p. 53) and “not amenable to a theory-proof definition” (Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1993). Although it is impossible to do justice to all the literature on the topic of finiteness within a short introductory paper, here, we will review some available definitions and proposed correlates of finiteness, and discuss some problems related to their cross-linguistic applicability (§1). We will then focus on the languages of Lowland South America and argue that these can help to shed light on the issue (§2). §3 presents the contributions that form the present special issue, and §4 concludes the paper with some considerations for future research on finiteness in the languages of Lowland South America.