The Languages of Native North America

This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

• A comprehensive reference work on all the indigenous languages of North America, listing their locations, number of speakers, genetic affiliation, structural features, and published sources
• It shows how structures in a number of North American languages call into question some long-held assumptions in linguistic theory, e.g. the distinction between nouns and verbs, roots and affixes etc.
• The linguistic data provides examples of very elaborately developed grammatical distinctions, including those of number, control, means and manner, location, tense, aspect, and modality