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  3. A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia
  • Cited by 78
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2003
Online ISBN:
9781107050952
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107050952
Subjects:
Area Studies, Latin American Studies, Other Languages and Linguistics, European and World Literature: General Interest, Language and Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Grammatical Descriptions
Information

Book description

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.

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

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