1 Derivation in Uto-Aztecan: Rarámuri Gabriela Caballero University of California, San Diego gcaballero@ucsd.edu To appear. In R. Lieber & P. Stekauer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Morphological Derivation. Oxford University Press. 1. Introduction This chapter addresses derivation mechanisms in the Uto-Aztecan language family through the lens of Rarámuri (Tarahumara), a Uto-Aztecan language of Northern Mexico. Through examination of representative derivational categories and processes in Rarámuri, this chapter situates derivation within the larger scheme of the agglutinating morphology of this language. Some of the more general theoretical and typological issues that the descriptive facts raise concern the nature of recursivity of derivational morphology, proposed general principles of affix order, as well as the intricacies of the morphophonological processes involved in marking these processes. This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief overview on the Uto-Aztecan language family. In Section 3, I characterize recurrent aspects of Uto-Aztecan morphological systems and describe three derivation strategies in Rarámuri, which are well-represented in Uto-Aztecan. This section focuses on both the categories overtly marked, as well as the morphophonological processes associated to both the concatenative and non-concatenative constructions deployed to mark these constructions. Section 4 concludes with a summary. 2. The Uto-Aztecan language family The Uto-Aztecan (UA) language family is the largest language family of the Americas in terms of number of languages, with more than sixty varieties still spoken by large numbers of speakers. The vast territory where UA languages were and are still spoken ranges from the Great Basin area in North America (with languages from the Numic branch) to El Salvador in Central America (Pipil (Aztecan)). Figure 1, based on classifications from Langacker 1977, Campbell 1997 and Mithun 1999, provides a simplified schema of individual languages and their genetic affiliation into major subgroupings. 1 1 The tree in Figure 1 groups individual branches into two main groups, Northern UA and Southern UA, a grouping that largely matches the geographical border between the US and Mexico. Northern UA has solidly been established as a genetic unit (Heath 1978, Manaster Ramer 1992), though evidence for the same status for the Southern branch is still debated (Kaufman 1974a, 1974b; Campbell and Langacker 1978; Heath 1978; Miller 1983, 1984; Cortina Borja and Valiñas Coalla 1989; Hill 2001). Languages that have no speakers left are marked with †.