LWM 451: A Descriptive Grammar of San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapote

A Descriptive Grammar of San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapote

Aaron Huey Sonnenschein
California State University, Northridge

In this grammar, the author provides a grammatical description of San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapotec, an endangered Otomanguean language. The initial six chapters provide a description of the major grammatical features of the language, while the final two examine two major issues in the description of this and other Zapotecan languages: parts-of-speech and word order.

The first six chapters provide descriptions of the ethnographic and sociolinguistic situations of the language, the sounds of the language, the pronominal system, the morphology, and the syntax of the language. San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapotec is a tonal language that can be complex phonologically. It is a prototypical VSO language having prepositions, NAdj, NDem, NGen, and NRel orders. Various means of combining clauses exist, including complementation, coordination, and relativization.

Chapter Seven is an examination of the lexical classes present in San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapotec. Much of the discussion is devoted to the grammaticalization of relational nouns, a topic that has received a great deal of discussion in the literature of Zapotecan and Otomanguean languages. In Chapter Eight, verb initial word order is examined, and a study of word order in San Bartolomé Zoogocho Zapotec texts is compared with other textual studies of word order in verb initial languages.

ISBN 9783895868030. Languages of the World/Materials 451. 308pp. 2005.