A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia

by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107264069
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/07/2003
Series:	Cambridge Grammatical Descriptions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	128 MB
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About the Author

Alexandra Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University. Her books include Language Contact in Amazonia (2003) and The Amazonian languages (co-edited with R. M. W. Dixon, Cambridge University Press, 1999). She has done extensive fieldwork on numerous Arawak languages from Brazil and has published a collection of texts in Tariana and also a Tariana-Portuguese dictionary.

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.

Editorial Reviews

"[...]a masterly piece of work[...]useful to the ordinary working linguist[...]It can be used as a model for writing a detailed technical grammar of an unusual language. It is an excellent model for anyone who must write a grammar of a severely endangered language, especially when the grammar is likely to be THE scholarly repository for all human time of that language's structure."
-Terry Malone, SIL

From the Publisher