A Grammar of Darma provides the first comprehensive description of this Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Uttarakhand, India. The analysis is informed by a functional-typological framework and draws on a corpus of data gathered through elicitation, observation and recordings of natural discourse. Every effort has been made to describe day-to-day language, so whenever possible, illustrative examples are taken from extemporaneous speech and contextualized. Sections of the grammar should appeal widely to scholars interested in South Asia’s languages and cultures, including discussions of the socio-cultural setting, the sound system, morphosyntactic, clause and discourse structure. The grammar’s interlinearized texts and glossary provide a trove of useful information for comparative linguists working on Tibeto-Burman languages and anyone interested in the world’s less-commonly spoken languages.
A grammar of Kurtöp presents the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of northeastern Bhutan. When possible, data are presented in a comparative light, lending insight into the development of phenomena such as tonogenesis and nominalizations.
This book provides a comprehensive grammatical description of Bunan, a Tibeto-Burman languages that is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the North Indian Himalayas. The grammar offers a systematic analysis of a wide range of grammatical phenomena, ranging from phonetics and phonology to complex syntactic constructions. Moreover, it contains a wealth of historical annotations, annotated texts, and a Bunan-English glossary.
With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.
With Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa), Timotheus Adrianus (Tim) Bodt provides the first comprehensive description of any of the Western Kho-Bwa languages, a sub-group of eight linguistic varieties of the Kho-Bwa cluster (Tibeto-Burman). Duhumbi is spoken by 600 people in the Chug valley in West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh, India. The Duhumbi people, known to the outside world as Chugpa or Chug Monpa, belong to the Monpa Scheduled Tribe. Despite that affiliation, Duhumbi is not intelligible to speakers of any of the other Monpa languages except Khispi (Lishpa). The volume Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa) describes all aspects of the language, including phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and discourse. Moreover, it also contains links to additional resources freely accessible on-line.
This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.
Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas — New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.
In The Dura Language: Grammar & Phylogeny Nicolas Schorer provides the definite descriptive account of this hitherto poorly documented language of Lamjung, Nepal. The Dura language is effectively extinct, although attempts at revival may be undertaken by well-intentioned members of Dura ethnicity. On the basis of a comprehensive study and analysis of all of the extant Dura language material, the book outlines the phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, lexical and syntactic properties as well as the phylogenetic position of the language in unprecedented detail. The result of the phylogenetic inquiry will help explain some of the sociocultural realities associated with the Dura community in Nepal and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the linguistic landscape of the Himalayas.
This essay relates together, in a clear and concise manner, four major groups of grammatical meanings — evidentiality for information source, egophopricity for access to knowledge, mirativity for expectation of knowledge, and epistemic modality for attitude to knowledge.
Kanashi, a Sino-Tibetan (ST) language belonging to the West Himalayish (WH) subbranch of this language family, is spoken in one single village (Malana in Kullu district, Himachal Pradesh state, India), which is surrounded by villages where – entirely unrelated – Indo-Aryan (IA) languages are spoken. Until we started working on Kanashi, very little linguistic material was available. Researchers have long speculated about the prehistory of Kanashi: how did it happen that it ended up spoken in one single village, completely cut off from its closest linguistic relatives? Even though suggestions have been made of a close genealogical relation between Kanashi and Kinnauri (another WH language), at present separated by over 200 km of rugged mountainous terrain, their shared linguistic features have not been discussed in the literature. Based on primary fieldwork, this volume presents some synchronic and diachronic aspects of Kanashi. The synchronic description of Kanashi includes a general introduction on Malana and the Kanashi language community (chapter 1), linguistic descriptions of its sound system (chapter 2), of phonological variation in Kanashi (chapter 4), of its grammar (chapter 3) and of its intriguing numeral systems (chapter 5), as well as basic vocabulary lists (Kanashi-English, English-Kanashi) (chapter 9). As for the diachronic and genealogical aspects (chapters 6–8), we compare and contrast Kanashi with other ST languages of this region (in particular languages of Kinnaur, notably Kinnauri), thereby uncovering some intriguing linguistic features common to Kanashi and Kinnauri which provide insights into their common history. For instance: a subset of borrowed IA nouns and adjectives in both languages end in -(a)ŋ or -(a)s, elements which do not otherwise appear in Kanashi or Kinnauri, nor in the IA donor languages (chapter 6); and both languages have a valency changing mechanism where the valency increasing marker -jaː alternates with the intransitive marker -e(d) in borrowed IA verbs (again: elements without an obvious provenance in the donor or recipient language) (chapter 7). These features are neither found in IA languages nor in the WH languages geographically closest to Kanashi (Pattani, Bunan, Tinani), but only in Kinnauri, which is spoken further away. Intriguingly, traces of some of these features are also found in some ST languages belonging to different ST subgroups (both WH and non-WH), spoken in Uttarakhand in India and in western Nepal (e.g. Rongpo, Chaudangsi, Raji and Raute). This raises fundamental questions regarding genealogical classification, language contact and prehistory of the WH group of languages and of this part of the Indian Himalayas, which are also discussed in the volume (chapter 8).
