Böcker i Mouton Grammar Library [MGL]-serien

This grammar is the first description of Emai, an Edoid language of 25-35,000 villagers in southern Nigeria. Individual chapters delineate noun and verb phrases, clause character in discourse, clause combinations as well as tone functions.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Offers a description of the endangered Oceanic language Daakaka, which is spoken by about 1000 speakers on the island of Ambrym, Vanuatu. This book emphasis on intricate system of nominal possession, the system of TAM and polarity markers and serial verb constructions. It is suitable for readers with an interest in Oceanic languages.

This book is the first published grammar of Aguaruna, known to its speakers as Iinia Chicham, a Jivaroan language spoken by some 55,000 people in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. Aguaruna is typologically and historically significant because of its l

Lao is the national language of Laos, and is also spoken widely in Thailand and Cambodia. It is a tone language of the Tai-Kadai family (Southwestern Tai branch). Lao is an extreme example of the isolating, analytic language type. This book is the most comprehensive grammatical description of Lao to date. It describes and analyses the important structures of the language, including classifiers, sentence-final particles, and serial verb constructions. Special attention is paid to grammatical topics from a semantic, pragmatic, and typological perspective.

A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author's fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The languages of this region remain under-documented for a number of historical reasons. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the widespread cultural practice of head-hunting discouraged outsiders from entering the Naga Hills. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, an armed rebellion by Naga separatists and a government policy of restricting access to the troubled area ensured that Nagaland remained a difficult place to conduct research. In this context, A Grammar of Mongsen Ao offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory. This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

Tommo So is a Dogon language with approximately 60,000 speakers in Mali, West Africa. As only the second full grammatical description of a Dogon language, this volume is a critical resource for solving the mystery of Dogon's genetic affiliation with other languages in Africa. Tommo So is an SOV language with isolating nominal morphology and agglutinative verbal morphology; suffixes on the verb mark tense/aspect/negation as well as subject agreement. The phonology is sensitive to levels of verbal morphology in that variable vowel harmony applies less frequently as one moves to outer layers of the morphology. The tone system of Tommo So is of typological interest in both its phonological and syntactic instantiations. Phonologically, it is a two-tone system of H and L, but these specified tones contrast with a surface-underspecified tone. Grammatically, the lexical tone of a word is often overwritten by syntactically-induced overlays. For example, an inalienable noun's tone will be replaced with L if it is possessed by a non-pronominal possessor, and by either H or HL if the possessor is pronominal. The language has also innovated a series of locative quasi-verbs and focus particles sensitive to pragmatic factors like certainty.

This book is a detailed high-quality descriptive grammar of the endangered Cavinena language (less than 1200 speakers), spoken in the Amazonian rainforest of Lowland Bolivia, an area where the indigenous languages are virtually unknown. Cavinena belongs to the Tacanan family, comprising five languages, none of which has been the subject of an adequate descriptive grammar. The grammar is based mostly on the extensive fieldwork conducted by the author in traditional Cavinena communities. Cast in the functional-typological framework, and based on natural discourse data, the grammar presents a detailed and copiously exemplified account of most aspects of the language, building up from basic levels (phonetic and phonological) to higher levels (morphological and syntactic), and from brief descriptions of each level to a more comprehensive description of the same level in specific chapters. The language contains a number of unusual features that will be of interest to typologist linguists, such as an unusual pitch accent system, a morpho-phonological rule that deletes case markers, an intricate predicate structure, a system of verbal suffixes coding associated motion, a specific causative of involvement marker, a peculiar prefix e- that attaches to nouns coding body parts and a complex system of second position clitic pronouns. The grammar will also be of interest to historical-comparative linguists, as for the first time one has sufficiently detailed grammatical information to make possible a reliable comparison with other languages with which Tacanan languages might be related, in particular the Panoan family, and to serve as input into hypotheses regarding the population history of this part of South America.

A Grammar of Eton is the first description of the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton. It is also one of the few complete descriptions of a North-western Bantu language. The complex tonology of Eton is carefully analysed and presented in a simple and consistent descriptive framework, which permits the reader to keep track of Eton's many tonal morphemes. Phonologists will be especially interested in the analysis of stem initial prominence, which manifests itself in a number of logically independent phenomena, including length of the onset consonant, phonotactic skewing and number of tonal attachment sites. Typologists and Africanists working on morphosyntax will find useful analyses of, among others, gender and agreement; tense, aspect, mood and negation; and verbal derivation. They will encounter many morphosyntactic differences between Eton and the better known Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, often due to evolutions shaped by maximality constraints on stems. The chapters on clause structure and complex constructions provide data hardly found in sources on the languages of the region, including descriptions of non-verbal clauses, focus, quasi-auxiliaries and adverbial clauses.

Jamsay is the largest-population language among some twenty Dogon languages in Mali, West Africa. This is the first comprehensive grammar of any Dogon language, including a full tonology. The language is verb-final, with subject agreement on the verb and with no other case-marking. Its most striking feature is the morphosyntactically triggered use of stem-wide tone-contour overlays on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. All stems have a lexical tone contour such as H[igh], L[ow]-H, HL, or LHL with at least one H-tone. An exam of tone overlay is tone-dropping to stem-wide all-L. This is used for Perfective verbs (in the presence of a focalized constituent), and for a noun or adjective before an adjective. It is also used to mark the head NP in a relative clause (the head NP is not extracted, so this is the only direct indication of head NP status). The verb in a relative clause is morphologically a participle, agreeing with the head NP in humanness and number, rather than with the subject. "e;Intonation"e; is used grammatically. For example, NP conjunction 'X and Y' is expressed as X Y, without a conjunction, but with "e;dying-quail"e; intonation on both conjuncts.

This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Maku or Vaupes-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupes region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun'stick, tree'. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

A Grammar of Dolakha Newar is the first fully comprehensive reference grammar of a Newar variety. Dolakha Newar is of particular interest as it is member of the mutually unintelligible eastern branch of the family, so allows for an important comparative perspective on this significant Tibeto-Burman language. In addition to a chapter on phonetics and phonology, the book contains a separate chapter on prosody. There are also distinct chapters on each word class, with full discussion of the morphological and syntactic properties of each class. The book provides an extensive study of syntax, including complete chapters on constructions, clause structure, constituent order, grammatical relations, nominalization, complementation, the participial construction, and the complex sentence, as well as a detailed chapter on tense and aspect. Brimming with examples from natural discourse, the book couples rigorous description of the language's structures with full discussion of how the structures are used in connected speech. Each analysis is presented with full argumentation and competing analyses are contrasted and discussed. The result is a rich, readable, and beautifully argued portrait of a language and how it works.

This work contains a comprehensive description of Kwaza, which is an endangered and unclassified indigenous language of Southern Rondonia, Brazil. The Kwaza language, also known in the literature as Koaia, is spoken by around 25 people today. Until recently, our knowledge of Kwaza was based on only three short word lists, from 1938, 1943 and 1984. Like the language, the culture and the history of its speakers are undocumented. The Kwaza people as an ethnic group have been decimated by increasing ecological, physical, social and cultural pressure from Western civilisation since contact in the past century. This is the situation for many indigenous peoples of Rondonia and of the Amazon region in general. Linguists expect that the majority of these peoples will cease to exist as distinct language communities during the coming decades. The present work is intended as a contribution to the documentation and preservation of the languages of the Amazon basin. In this respect, Kwaza has represents an especially urgent case in view of its undetermined classification, the lack of documentation and its endangered status. This work is based on the author's personal fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2002, and it consists of three parts. Part I contains a thorough description of the phonology and morphosyntax of the language and a concise overview of its social, cultural and historical context. Part II contains a diverse selection of transcribed and translated texts with interlinear morphological analyses. Part III is a dictionary of Kwaza, including many examples and an English-Kwaza register. This complete description is of interest to linguists in general, scholars of South American languages in particular, and anthropologists and historians interested in the Guapore region.

Kolyma Yukaghir is a seriously endangered language spoken by about 50 people in the northeast of Asiatic Russia. It is one of the two surviving languages of the Yukaghir family, which is considered by different scholars either as an isolate left over from before the expansion of other languages and language families into Siberia, or as a distant relative of the Uralic family. In many ways, Yukaghir fits the grammatical type widespread among the languages of Siberia, namely that of predominantly verb-final dependent-marking language with relatively rich agglumative morphology and deranking strategies of clause linking. Furthermore, it has a number of typologically remarkably features, which will be of interest to general linguists irrespective of their theoretical orientation. These include Yukaghir focus-marking system, differential object marking based on global effects of person hierarchy, the obligatory use of bound possesive markers to indicate non-coreference of the possessor with the subject, elaborated switch-reference system, initimate interaction between aspect and valence-changing derivation, etc. The book incorporates all major components of descriptive grammar, from phonology to syntax, with a special chapter on coreference and discourse coherence, annotated and translated sample texts, a Yukaghir-English vocabulary, and a subject index. The description is based on extensive field materials and richly exemplified by non-elicited data. The organization of the book facilitates its use as a reference grammar, with numerous cross-references between sections and concise summaries of interrelated phenomena discussed in various parts of the grammar. The book is of interest to scholars of Uralic and Siberian languages, linguistic typology, and general linguistics.

Lavukaleve is a Papuan Language spoken on the Russell Islands in the Central Province of the Solomon Islands. The phonology and morpho-phonology of Lavukaleve are described, as well as arguments adjuncts, the Lavukaleve predicate structure (including predicate types and core participant marking, the agreement suffix, focus constructions, tense, aspect and mood, word-level derivation, complex predicates), interclausal syntax, and the Lavukaleve discourse organisation. The book includes a list of affixes, a list of lexemes, and an appendix with Lavukaleve texts. The data used in this work was collected by the author during five field trips.

Moseten belongs to the small, unclassified language family Mosetenan and is spoken by roughly 800 people in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes and the adjoining lowland region. This book provides a grammatical description of Moseten in the form of a descriptive reference grammar. It is based on the author's extensive fieldwork in Bolivia and is intended to be comprehensive and aimed at linguists from all backgrounds. Belonging to an unclassified language family, Moseten is of special interest to typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and South Americanists. The grammar is divided into a chapter on phonology (2.) and six chapters on the morphology: morphological processes (3.) the nominal system (4.), pronouns and reference (5.), adjectives and adverbs (6.), quantification (7.) and the verbal system (8.). These chapters are followed by voice (9.), negation (10.) and modality and discourse markers (11.). Finally, there are two syntactically oriented chapters on clause types (12.) and clause combinations (13.). In the appendix, three types of texts, a list of morphemes, a list of references and further bibliographical notes are added. Furthermore, there is an index. This grammar is the first accessible and comprehensive description of a Mosetenan language.