A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia
A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia
This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.
- Full reference grammar of a relatively undescribed and currently endangered language
- An account of the multilingualism resulting from strict traditions of exogamy and its effect on the structure of a language
- A description of varied unusual linguistic features in typological perspective (classifiers, evidentiality, serial verbs and many others)
Product details
November 2006Paperback
9780521028868
732 pages
243 × 170 × 38 mm
1.143kg
1 map 58 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- List of tables, schemes and diagrams
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Organisation and cross-referencing
- List of abbreviations
- Map
- 1. The language and its speakers
- 2. Phonology
- 3. Word classes
- 4. Nominal morphology and noun structure
- 5. Noun classes and classifiers
- 6. Possession
- 7. Case marking and grammatical relations
- 8. Number
- 9. Further nominal categories
- 10. Derivation and compounding
- 11. Closed word classes
- 12. Verb classes and predicate structure
- 13. Valency changing and argument rearranging mechanisms
- 14. Tense and evidentiality
- 15. Aspect, Aktionsart and degree
- 16. Mood and modality
- 17. Negation
- 18. Serial verb constructions and verb compounding
- 19. Complex predicates
- 20. Participles and nominalisations
- 21. Clause types and other syntactic issues
- 22. Subordinate clauses and clause linking
- 23. Relative clauses
- 24. Complement clauses
- 25. Discourse organisation
- 26. Issues in etymology and semantics
- Appendix
- Texts
- Vocabulary
- References
- Index.
