Pech (Paya)

Dennis Holt
Quinnipiac College, Hamden

The Pech language, an outlying member of the Chibchan family, is spoken by a few hundred people in northeastern Honduras. It is a tone-language of a relatively simple type, with just two distinctive pitch-levels. The phonemic inventory includes plain stops (among them just one voiced stop, b), fricatives, nasals, glides, and both oral and nasal vowels. Vowel allophony is largely motivated by syllable-type.

Pech is largely synthetic, involving rather complex, mostly suffixal morphology, especially in verb-forms, but also exhibiting prefixing, vocalic ablaut, reduplication, etc., as active morphological processes. Nouns and noun-phrases may be marked for grammatical function with case-suffixes. Pronominal possession is marked with a prefix on the possessed noun. Word-order is generally subject-object-verb. Both qualitative and quantitative adjectives follow the nouns that they modify; however, demonstrative adjectives precede nouns. Subordination is a very active process, and complex sentences are common; however, compound sentences are rare.

ISBN 9783895869129. Languages of the World/Materials 366. 80pp. 1999.

Sundanese

Franz Müller-Gotama
California State University, Fullerton

Sundanese (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian) is the indigenous language of West Java, Indonesia. With approximately 25 million speakers, it is the second largest regional language in Indonesia after Javanese. The Priangan dialect of the area around the provincial capital of Bandung is considered standard and is taught in elementary school in West Java as well as forming the medium, of a lively, if limited, publishing business. The book presents a theory-neutral description of the essential structure of standard Sundanese, emphasizing its typologically most interesting features.

Like its neighbor Javanese, Sundanese has distinct speech levels, which require a speaker to select from a different set of vocabulary items depending on the relative status of the interlocutors. Sundanese developed these speech levels relatively recently as a result of the Javanese hegemony over West Java during the Mataram period, and the system is consequently less elaborately developed than in Javanese. Sundanese morphology is rather more complex that than of Indonesian. The chapter on morphology will concentrate on the elaborate system of forming plurals from nouns, verbs, and adjectives and on reduplication. The chapter on syntax will deal with such issues as basic word order and phrase structure, diathesis, negation, the use of the topic and focus markers, and coordination and subordination.

ISBN 9783895869266. Languages of the World/Materials 369. 80pp. 2001.

Grammar and Texts of the Yugambeh-Bundjalung dialect chain in Eastern Australia

Margaret Sharpe
The University of New England

The Yugambeh-Bandjalang chain of dialects (most now either extinct or having only limited use) stretches from some 16 km south of Brisbane to north of Yamba on the mouth of the Clarence River in New South Wales, and inland almost to Tenterfield (NSW) and past Warwick (Qld). It is a member of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Dialect names (which include Yugambeh, Bandjalang and Gidhabal) were mostly named for the way some words were pronounced, the named being assigned sometimes by the group in question and sometimes by their neighbours. Reasonably uncommon among Australian languages there are fricative allophonic variations in the four obstruents (written b, d, j/dh/dj, g/k in practical orthographies); word medially /d/ and /j/ collapse together to an interdental fricative, an alveopalatal stop or a sibilant fricative according to dialect.

The language is ergative; however pronouns and nouns for large animate creatures also have accusative inflection. There are or were four genders, masculine and feminine applying to humans, arboreal to trees, and neuter to everything else. There are no bound pronouns, and the language is aspect prominent, with a number of orders of verbal suffixes including one for antipassivity/reflexivity. Up to about 14 common verbs are irregular to a lesser or greater degree, but all other inflections of verbs and nouns followed predictable patterns.

ISBN 9783895867842. Languages of the World/Materials 370. 194pp. 2005.

The Sabellic Languages of Ancient Italy

Rex E. Wallace
University of Massachusetts Amherst

This book provides a grammatical description of the Sabellic languages of ancient Italy, focusing on Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene. These languages are attested through written documents (inscriptions incised on stone, metal, and ceramic) that date from the 7th century BCE to the 1st century AD. As a whole they form the most important group of languages spoken on the Italian peninsula in the period before Roman expansion.

A general overview places these languages within their historical context and describes their relationship to each other, to Latin, and to other members of the Indo-European language family. The principal chapters of the book treat phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis. Also included is a detailed description of the features of the alphabets in which the Sabellic languages were written. A chapter on nomenclature describes the structure of the onomastic system. The concluding chapter provides a detailed word-by-word analysis of important inscriptions in each language.

ISBN 9783895869907. Languages of the World/Materials 371. 90pp. 2007.

Tundra Yukaghir

Elena Maslova
Stanford University

Tundra Yukaghir is one of the extant Yukaghir languages, two highly threatened languages spoken in the north-east of Russia. Yukaghir is considered by different scholars either as a genetic isolate or as a distant relative of the Uralic family, and is therefore crucial to reconstruction of prehistory of Siberia and, potentially, of the Uralic family; for the same reason, it is almost a must in any sample-based research on cross-linguistic variability. In a number of ways, Tundra Yukaghir is similar to the languages of the region. It is a predominantly head-final language with agglutinating morphology. Clause-linking strategies are based on a variety of non-finite verb forms; coordination and balancing strategies are virtually absent. However, there is a number of significant differences, including but not limited to a morphological Focus-marking system, a set of topic-introducing devices based on non-finite forms of copula, absence of grammaticalized past/present distinction, a specialized cross-reference marker of non-reflexive Possessor opposed to reflexive possessive pronouns. The Focus system, which also saliently affects the case alignment, and the tense/aspect/mood system constitute two major domains of grammatical divergence between the two Yukaghir languages, Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir.
The book constitutes the first grammatical overview of Tundra Yukaghir to be published in English. It is based on previous studies (Krejnoviè 1958, 1982), the author's own field notes (1987, settlement Andryushkino) and analysis of texts archived in the Yakut branch of Russian Academy of Sciences.

ISBN9783895867927. Languages of the World/Materials 372. 100pp. 2003.

Mapudungun

Fernando Zúñiga
Universitaet Zuerich

Mapudungu(n), sometimes also called Mapuche or Araucanian, is not only one of the indigenous languages of the Americas whose genetic affiliation is still obscure but also one of the comparatively few languages of the region spoken by a considerable number of speakers (some thousands in Argentina and an uncertain figure -possibly close to 200'000 native, but not monolingual, speakers- in South Central Chile). Mapudungun has been rightly recognized as a crucial factor in this ethnic group's struggle for cultural survival.

Despite the fact that the bulk of indigenous loanwords in Chilean and Argentinian Spanish comes from other languages, especially Chilean toponymy shows a profound Mapudungun influence way beyond present-day Mapuche territories.

Although there are some more or less comprehensive grammars of the language written in the 20th century, this is to be the first short reference grammar of this polysynthetic language available in English. Some remarkable features are the following: rather simple phonology (unlike its surviving neighbors, Mapudungun has neither uvular nor glottalized phonemes; there are six vowels and only few consonant clusters), simple nominal morphology (neither case nor gender, marginal number), fairly complex verbal morphology (detailed aspectual and spatial categories, several productive valency-changing operators, polypersonalism, inverse system, nominal incorporation), and clause linkage patterns that rely heavily on semantically rather vague reduced verb forms.

ISBN 3895869761. Languages of the World/Materials 376. 88pp. 2000.

Peking Mandarin

Dingxu Shi
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The book is a descriptive grammar of Peking Mandarin, the Chinese dialect spoken in the capital of China. It is a reference grammar for learners of Mandarin but is also designed for those who are interested at Peking Mandarin and its special features. It is comprehensive because it will cover all aspects of Peking Mandarin, i.e., its history and evolution, its sound system, word and phrase structures, sentence structures, special sentence patterns and discourse features. It is also selectively in depth because issues not dealt with in most Mandarin grammar books will be given special attention here. The most prominent issues to be discussed are the parallelism between the internal structure of compounds, phrases and sentences; the complex predicates, the relatively free word order and its semantic implications; the complex sentences; the after thought structure; the focus and topic constructions; the prevalence of phonetically null forms and the recovery of their reference or signifié; and the dependency between syntax and semantics, discourse and pragmatics.

The author Dingxu Shi is an associate professor of Chinese linguistics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He does research on syntax, interface strategy, and language contact and language change.

ISBN 9783895868252. Languages of the World/Materials 377. 132pp. 2004.

Northern Talysh

Wolfgang Schulze
Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich

Talysh is classified as a Northwest Iranian language that is spoken by roughly 200.000 people both in northwestern Iran and southern Azerbajdžan. This booklet concentrates on the northern (Azerbajdžani) variants of the language spoken by about 80.000 people in the Astara and Lenkoran areas. The morphosyntax of Northern Talysh is characterized by a complicated split system which is based on the Northwest Iranian type of accusativity/ergativity dichotomy: It shows accusative features with present stem based transitive constructions, whereas past stem based construction tend towards an ergative behavior. Salient features are among others: a general oblique case to cover peripheric functions (split-O in accusative structures, split-A in ergative structures); tripartite system of personal pronouns, floating clitics in ergative structures that cross-reference the agentive function A; backgrounding of S and A in some types of subordination. Due to interferences with Azeri, Northern Talysh shows remarkable features of 're-agglutination' both in its case system and in verbal inflection.

The present portrayal of Northern Talysh is based on the author's fieldwork and is both descriptive and explanatory: it concentrates on features of actance typology explaining the architecture of its 'Operating System' and the emergence of split structures from both a typological and a cognitive perspective. Other important explanatory parameters make reference to Historical Linguistics. Additionally, the interaction of Northern Talysh phonology and grammar is described. The sketch is supplemented by the documentation of an oral account (palangi ahvolot 'Encounter with a leopard') – given with full morphological glosses and translation – and by a word index.

ISBN 9783895866814. Languages of the World/Materials 380. 76pp. 2000.

Danish

Michael Herslund
Copenhagen Business School

Danish, a Scandinavian (North Germanic) language, is spoken by about 5.5 million people in Denmark and by minorities in Schleswig (Northern Germany). It is also used as a second language in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. In its phonology, Danish is like the other Scandinavian languages a two accent language, the two word tones of Swedish and Norwegian correspond to presence and absence of a glottal catch (the so called stød). A rather simple consonantal system is supplemented by an extraordinary rich array of vowels. The morphology is like that of the other Scandinavian languages relatively simple: no inflection for case, no inflection for person in the verb, and only two verb tenses, present and preterite, but contrary to both English and German there is an inflectional passive.

This morphological simplicity is however compensated for syntactically by an extended use of prepositions in the transitivity system, and a heavy reliance on prosody, and especially morpheme and word order, both within the phrase and within the clause, so that Danish grammarians tend to view the topology as an independent semiotic level and indeed the basic organisational principle of Danish syntax. Major focuses will therefore be on topics such as transitivity and word order.

Michael Herslund, dr.phil., Professor of French Linguistics, Faculty of Modern Languages, Copenhagen Business School.

ISBN 9783895863967. Languages of the World/Materials 382. 128pp. 2002.

Bagri

Lakhan Gusain
Centre of Rajasthani Studies, Purabsar

This is the first comprehensive linguistic study of Bagri, a dialect of Rajasthani language of Indo-Aryan family, spoken by about five million speakers in Hanumangarh and Sriganganagar districts of Rajasthan, Sirsa and Hissar districts of Haryana, Firozepur and Muktsar districts of Punjab of India and Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar areas of Punjab of Pakistan. Bagri is a typical Indo-Aryan language having SOV word order.

The grammar includes chapters on phonology, morphology, syntax, and a sample text. There are 31 consonants, 10 vowels, 2 diphthongs, and 3 tones in Bagri. Retroflexion is an important feature. There are two numbers--singular and plural; two genders--masculine and feminine; and three cases--simple, oblique, and vocative. The nouns are declined according to their final segments. Case marking is partly inflectional and partly postpositional. All pronouns are inflected for number and case but gender is distinguished only in the third person singular pronouns.

The third person pronouns are distinguished on the proximity/remoteness dimension in each gender. There are three tenses four moods in Bagri. Adjectives are of two types--either ending in /-o/ or not. Cardinal numbers upto ten are inflected. Both present and past participles function as adjectives. Sentence types are of traditional natre. Coordination and subordination are described in complex sentences. Particles are also analysed.

ISBN 9783895863981. Languages of the World/Materials 384. 84pp. 2000.