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.
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.
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.
Gaagudju is a previously undescribed and now nearly extinct language of northern Australia. This grammar provides an overall description of the language. Australian languages generally show a high degree of structural similarity to one another. Gaagudju conforms to some of the common Australian patterns, yet diverges significantly from others. Thus while it has a standard Australian phonological inventory, its prosodic systems differ from those of most Australian languages, with stressed and unstressed syllables showing marked differences in realisation. Like many northern languages, it has complex systems of both prefixation and suffixation to nominals and verbs. Prefixation provides information about nominal classification (4 classes), mood, and pronominal cross-reference (Subjects, Objects, and Indirect Objects). Suffixation provides information about case, tense, and aspect. As in many languages, there is a clear distinction between productive and unproductive morphology. Gaagudju differs from most Australian languages in that a considerable amount of its morphology is unproductive, showing complex and irregular allomorphic variation. Gaagudju is like most Australian languages in that it may be described as a free word order language. However, word order is not totally free and strictly ordered phrasal compounding structures are significant (e.g. in the formation of denominal verbs).
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.
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.
Warrongo is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language that used to be spoken in northeast Australia. This volume is largely based on the rich data recorded from the last fluent speaker. It details the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. In particular, it provides a truly scrutinizing description of syntactic ergativity - a phenomenon that is rare among the world's language. It also shows that, unlike some other Australian languages, Warrongo has noun phrases that are configurational. Overall this volume shows what can be documented of a language that has only one speaker.
This is the first description of Goemai, a West Chadic language of Nigeria. Goemai is spoken in a language contact area, and this contact has shaped Goemai grammar to the extent that it can be considered a fairly untypical Chadic language. The grammar presents the structure of the present-day language, relates it to its diachronic sources, and adds a semantic perspective to the description.
Vaeakau-Taumako, also known as Pileni, is a Polynesian Outlier language spoken in the Reef and Duff Islands in the Solomon Islands' Temotu Province. This is an area of great linguistic diversity and long-standing language contact which has had far-reaching effects on the linguistic situation. Historically, speakers of Vaeakau-Taumako were shipbuilders and navigators who made trade voyages throughout the area, bringing them into constant contact with speakers of the Reefs-Santa Cruz, Utupua and Vanikoro languages. The latter languages are only distantly related to Vaeakau-Taumako, making up an only recently identified first-order subgroup of Oceanic. Polynesian speakers first arrived in the area some 700-1000 years ago from the core Polynesian areas to the east. While today most intra-group communication takes place in Solomon Islands Pijin, traditionally the situation was one of extensive multilingualism, and this has left profound traces in the grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako, which shows a number of structural properties not known from other Polynesian languages.A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako is the most comprehensive grammar of any Polynesian Outlier to date, and the first full-length grammar of any language of Temotu Province. Based on extensive fieldwork, it is structured as a reference grammar dealing with all aspects of language structure, from phonology to discourse organization, and including a selection of glossed texts. It will be of interest to typologists, Oceanic linguists, and researchers interested in language contact. i
Wandala is a hitherto undescribed Central Chadic language spoken in Northern Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria. The Grammar of Wandala describes, in a non-aprioristic approach, phonology, morphology, syntax, and all functional domains grammaticalized in the language. The grammatical structure of Wandala is quite different from the structure of other Chadic languages described thus far in both the formal means and the functions that have been grammaticalized. The grammar provides proofs for the postulated hypotheses concerning forms and functions. The grammar is written in a style accessible to linguists working within different theoretical frameworks. The phonology is characterized by a rich consonantal system, a three vowel system, and a two tone system. The language has abundant vowel insertion rules and a vowel harmony system. Vowel deletion marks phrase-internal position, and vowel-insertion marks phrase-final position. The two rules allow the parsing of the clause into constituents. The language has three types of reduplication of verbs, two of which code aspectual and modal distinctions. The negative paradigms of verbs differ from affirmative paradigms in the coding of subject. The pronominal affixes and extensive system of verbal extensions code the grammatical and semantic relations within the clause. Wandala has unusual clausal structure, in that in a pragmatically neutral verbal clause, there is only one nominal argument, either the subject or the object. These arguments can follow a variety of constituents. The grammatical role of that argument is coded by inflectional markers on the verb and most interestingly, on whatever lexical or grammatical morpheme precedes the constituent. The markers of grammatical relations added to verbs are different for different classes of verbs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hdi is a hitherto undescribed language spoken in northern Cameroon. The language belongs to the Central Branch of Chadic. The aim of the book is to provide a fairly complete description of the grammar of this language. Consequently, the grammar describes the phonology, morphology and syntax of Hdi and the semantic and discourse functions coded in this language. Most clauses in Hdi are verb-initial, with the subject directly following the verb. The object is often marked by a preposition. What makes Hdi unusual is that the object-marking preposition is unique and does not function elsewhere as a locative preposition. Another interesting feature of Hdi is that there are two types of clauses, pragmatically independent and pragmatically dependent, and that the difference between these is coded by different tense and aspectual systems. In addition, there are two clausal orders for complex sentences: The order embedded clause-matrix clause codes one type of modality, while the order matrix clause-embedded clause codes another. The language also has a rich system of verbal extensions coding the semantic roles of arguments and adjuncts and the direction of movement. The grammar is of interest not only to linguists working in African, Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics, but also to general linguists, since it describes phenomena rarely seen in other languages of the world. The grammar is described in terms accessible to linguists working within various theoretical frameworks.
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.
Teiwa is a non-Austronesian ('Papuan') language spoken on the island of Pantar, in eastern Indonesia, located just north of Timor island. It has approx. 4,000 speakers and is highly endangered. While the non-Austronesian languages of the Alor-Pantar archipelago are clearly related to each other, as indicated by the many apparent cognates and the very similar pronominal paradigms found across the group, their genetic relationship to other Papuan languages remains controversial. Located some 1,000 km from their putative Papuan neighbors on the New Guinea mainland, the Alor-Pantar languages are the most distant westerly Papuan outliers. A grammar of Teiwa presents a grammatical description of one of these 'outlier' languages. The book is structured as a reference grammar: after a general introduction on the language, it speakers and the linguistic situation on Alor and Pantar, the grammar builds up from a description of the language's phonology and word classes to its larger grammatical constituents and their mutual relations: nominal phrases, serial verb constructions, clauses, clause combinations, and information structure. While many Papuan languages are morphologically complex, Teiwa is almost analytic: it has only one paradigm of object marking prefixes, and one verbal suffix marking realis status. Other typologically interesting features of the language include: (i) the presence of uvular fricatives and stops, which is atypical for languages of eastern Indonesia; (ii) the absence of trivalent verbs: transitive verbs select a single (animate or inanimate) object, while the additional participant is expressed with a separate predicate; and (iii) the absence of morpho-syntactically encoded embedded clauses. A grammar of Teiwa is based on primary field data, collected by the author in 2003-2007. A selection of glossed and translated Teiwa texts of various genres and word lists (Teiwa-English / English-Teiwa) are included.
Madurese is a major regional language of Indonesia, with some 14 million speakers, mainly on the island of Madura and adjacent parts of Java, making it the fourth largest language of Indonesia after Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese. There is no existing comprehensive descriptive grammar of the language, with existing studies being either sketches of the whole grammar, or detailed descriptions of phonology and morphology or some particular topics within these components of the grammar. There is no competing work that provides the breadth and depth of coverage of this grammar, in particular (though not exclusively) with regard to syntax.
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.
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.
This book is a reference grammar of Fongbe, a language which is part of the Gbe dialect cluster. It is spoken mainly in the former kingdom of Dahomey, which today comprises the southern areas of Benin and Togo. This book has three objectives: First, its main purpose is to provide a thorough description of the grammar of Fongbe. Second, this book provides language-specific syntactic tests which were developed in the course of this research. Finally, we provide the reader with the most exhaustive list possible of references on Fongbe, and on the Gbe languages in general. This book thus attempts to represent a "e;state of the art"e; of the language itself, and of the analyses proposed to account for its particular constructions. This book is of particular interest to Africanists, scholars interested in comparative linguistics or in the reconstruction of language families, and creolists who work on the languages spoken in the Caribbean area.
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