Interview with Denny Moore (DM) by Luciana Storto (LS)

Abstract

Denny Moore (Dennis Albert Moore) is a North American linguist based in Brazil who works on the description and analysis of Gavião (an indigenous language of the Mondé branch of the Tupian Family) and who dedicated his career to the institutional development of the area of indigenous linguistics at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG) in Belém, Pará, as well as to economic and educational projects for indigenous peoples. Denny has contributed, still, to the development of human resources by advising and helping 23 students to graduate in indigenous linguistics at Masters and PhD levels. He came from the United States during his Ph.D. and lived among the Gavião people of Rondonia for two and a half years until he learned their language and concluded his Ph.D, which is a formal analysis of the grammar of the Gavião language, in 1984. After his Ph.D., he decided to settle in Brazil and contribute to the scientific and institutional development of the area of linguistics. In this informal conversation with Luciana Storto, one of the linguists he advised as a junior researcher in linguistics at the MPEG and helped during her post-graduate studies in the 1990s, he tells us how he became interested in doing research in indigenous linguistics and how his career developed since then until now.