Oneida

Clifford Abbott
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

Oneida is an endangered language of the Iroquoian family of northeastern North America. Among its more notable structural features are: its relatively small phonemic inventory lacking in labials; its use of whispered syllables; the complexity of the verbal morphology; the dominance of verbal structures over nominal ones; and the productive use of noun incorporation.

The current work is based on two and a half decades of field work in the Wisconsin community of Oneidas where there are now fewer than a couple dozen native speakers remaining. Other communities exist in Ontario and New York state where the language is similarly endangered. Despite the endangered status there is an oral literature, primarily in the rich ceremonial tradition. The community actively invests in language revitalization efforts and there is limited literacy in an orthography not more than a few decades old.

Clifford Abbott is an associate professor in Information Sciences and in American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay. He has worked with the Wisconsin Oneida community since 1974 developing language revitalization materials. He has published articles on Oneida texts and structure as well as a dictionary in 1996.

Outline of Oneida Grammar:

Setting: related languages, the speech community
Phonology: phonemics, suprasegmentals, whispering
Morphology: word classes: formal and functional; verb morphology: prefix system, pronominal system, stem structure and stem classes, transitivity, tense\aspect suffixes, noun incorporation, noun morphology, possessive prefixes, suffixes, locatives, plurals, others particles: independent pronouns, interrogatives, adverbials, syntactic particles, discourse particles
Syntax: basic structures, complex structures
Text analysis
Charts: prefix system, pronoun system, verb structure, tense\aspect suffixes
Bibliography

ISBN 9783895865558. Languages of the World/ Materials 301. 60pp. 2000.

Sapuan

Pascale Jacq & Paul Sidwell
University of Melbourne

Sapuan (autonym Sapucr) is an endangered West Bahnaric (Mon-Khmer) language spoken by the population of a single village, Ban Sapuan, about 40 kms north of Attapeu (Lao PDR).

Other than a short wordlist collected early this century, no other descriptions of Sapuan are known. The present sketch grammar is prepared on the basis of the authors' recent fieldwork. Sapuan phonology and syntax are discussed and short glossed texts and a lexicon are provided.

ISBN 9783895865596. Languages of the World/ Materials 302. 60pp. 1999.

Ostyak

Irina Nikolaeva
SOAS, University of London

This study is intended to provide a grammatical description of Ostyak, one of the Uralic languages spoken in Western Siberia. The description is based on the Northern Ostyak dialect of Obdorsk, although divergent features of other dialects are also discussed. The present paper emphasizes the syntactic aspect of the language, typically ignored in previous descriptive ork on Ostyak, which mostly concentrates on its phonology and morphology.

Part 1 is a concise sketch of the Ostyak grammar, made up of the following sections: "Introductory remarks" (geo- and sociolinguistic data, previous studies, dialect division), "Phonology" (including phonotactics and prosody), "Morphology" (grammatical categories, word formation, illustrative paradigms), and "Basic syntax" (types of simple and complex sentences, discourse phenomena). A sample text in the Obdorsk dialect of Ostyak is provided.

Part 2 elaborates on certain syntactic topics that are of a particular interest from the typological viewpoint. In particular, the following topics are discussed: information structure and word order, object agreement, passivization, the relative clause, clause-chaining and reference tracking, and the category of the evidential. .

Part 3 serves to provide the necessary reference. It contains the bibliography relevant to the present study, as well as the basic bibliography on Ostyak. The latter includes editions of the folklore texts, lexicographic publications, comprehensive descriptions, and the most important studies on certain aspects of the Ostyak grammar. .

Irina Nikolaeva completed her dissertation at the Finno-Ugric department of the Institute for Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Science. She has been publishing on synchronic and diachronic aspects on various Siberian languages.

ISBN 9783895865626. Languages of the World/ Materials 305.100 pp. 1999.

Santali

Lukas Neukom
Universität Zürich

Santali belongs to the North-Munda branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family. It is the largest Munda language, spoken by 5.8 million people, who live scattered over the Indian states of Bihar, West-Bengal and Orissa. Most of them are bilingual in Santali and in the local dominant Indo-Aryan language.

The Santali phonemic system includes a series of retroflex consonants, voiced and voiceless aspirated stops and glottalized stops in word-final position, alternating with the voiced series. Some harmony rules underly the vocalism.

Nouns can be marked for number (singular, dual, plural), class (±animate), case (seven in number), possessor and focus or topic. The demonstrative system has four dimensions: distance (near / far / far away), ±emphatic, ±animate, and number.

Santali has a very elaborate verb morphology. Besides various types of argument marking (subject, object, concerned object) the verb is inflected for seven TAM categories the markers of which have two shapes, one for active and one for middle voice. In addition, several derivational processes apply to the stem, such as the marking of reciprocal or intensive. Verbs in series are very common.

Santali is known to have a weak distinction between nouns and verbs, many stems are used both in argument and predicate function. The analysis is mainly based on data collected by Bodding, especially on his text collection (published in 1925) and on his huge dictionary (1929-36).

Critical portions of the grammar have been discussed with a native speaker.

ISBN9783895866104. Languages of the World/ Materials 323. 250pp. 2001.

Pileni

Ashild Naess

University of Oslo

The Polynesian Outlier language Pileni is spoken by approximately 2, 000 people on a group of small coral islands in Temotu Province, Solomon Islands. Situated in a fairly isolated area of the Pacific, the islands have a long tradition of trade connections with the nearby Reefs and Santa Cruz islands, whose little-described languages do not appear to be Austronesian and so are totally unrelated to Pileni. This prolonged language contact has resulted in a number of features in Pileni which are highly unusual for a Polynesian language. The language has little morphological case-marking and relies mainly on a basic SVO word order for the differentiation of nominal arguments, although word order is flexible according to certain rules.

Pileni is clearly a nominative-accusative language, although certain morphosyntactic processes reflect what may be traces of an earlier ergative morphology.

In the basics of its phonology and morphology Pileni resembles other Polynesian languages, although the phonology is considerably more complex than is common in these languages, with phonemic aspiration on stops and a number of phonetically conditioned consonant alternations. The language exhibits characteristic Polynesian features of morphology such as the distinction between "o-type" and "a-type" possession and a complex system of personal pronouns.

Since this is the first systematic description of the Pileni language and based on a relatively limited material, it must be regarded as preliminary and open to correction. It will, however, provide a useful basis for further studies of the Pileni language.

ISBN 9783895869327. Languages of the World/ Materials 325. 60pp. 2000.

Tobelo

Gary Holton
Alaska Native Language Center

Tobelo is a Papuan language spoken by approximately 15,000 persons on the islands of Halmahera and Morotai in the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku. The phonemic inventory of Tobelo consists of five vowels and twenty consonants, including a palatal lateral, glide and nasal. Syllable structure is generally (C)V. Roots are categorialy ambivalent and can occur as either nouns or verbs with appropriate morphology. Verbal morphology is relatively rich, including a system of obligatory pronominal prefixes and optional aspectual suffixes. Nouns occur as adjuncts to pronominal arguments and are obligatorily marked by a proclitic. Word order is SOV, though not rigidly so. Complex verb constructions are paratactic, consisting of a series of verbs each cross-referencing one or more arguments and fully inflected for aspect. There is no morphological marker of subordination and no indication of finiteness.

Holton is a documentary linguist who has conducted field work with several Austronesian and Papuan languages in eastern Indonesia. Previous publications include an annotated bibliography of language and linguistics in Maluku and several studies of Tobelo grammar and discourse. He is currently assistant professor of linguistics at the Alaska Native Language Center, where he is engaged in the documentation and revitalization of Alaska Athabascan languages.

ISBN 9783895867064. Languages of the World/Materials 328. 106pp. 2003.

Ogbronuagum

Ethelbert Kari
University of Port Harcourt

Ogbronuagum is a central Delta language spoken by about 12,000 people in the present Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State of Nigeria. It is spoken by the Agum (Bukuma) Community.

The sketch, which is the first attempt at providing a fairly comprehensive description of Ogbronuagum, is divided into six sections. Section one re-examines the phonology as decribed by Alex (1987), and establishes more consonants. In section two, the morphology of the language is discussed. The noun class system as established by Alex (1987) is also re-examined and more genders than she established are found. The morphology of verbs, tense aspect and modality, and nominal modifiers are treated in some detail. Section three is concerned with syntax. Here different noun phrase constructions and phenomena such as concord, co-ordination, subordination, relativisation, serial verb constructions, focus and cliticisation are discussed. Section four is a sample text with interlinear translation. In section five, the history of the Agum people is presented. The sketch concludes with a lexicon.

ISBN 9783895866180. Languages of the World/Materials 329. 80pp. 2000.

Wolof

Fallou Ngom
Western Washington University

This book provides an account of the phonological, morphological and grammatical traits of Wolof as spoken in Senegal. Wolof belongs to the West Atlantic language family, which in turn belongs to the larger Niger-Congo phylum. The language is primarily spoken in Senegal and The Gambia. About 10 million people in the following West African states speak it: Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania. Nowadays, Wolof is one of the major languages used both by individuals with different historical and linguistic background, and by the radio stations in The Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania. The language has eight noun classes and a rich inflectional morphology. Classical Arabic and standard French have influenced Wolof. The Arabic influence is due to the fact that over 80 % of Wolof speakers are Muslim. The French influence dates back to the French colonization of Senegal. Thus, various lexical units are borrowed from these languages and are generally adapted to the linguistic system of the language by means of morpho-phonological rules.

Despite the important scope of the language in these countries, practical work dealing with its grammar is still limited. This book aims at filling that gap. Thus, it provides a detailed description of the grammatical patterns of Wolof spoken in Senegal. The first chapter provides a detailed description of the Wolof phonemic system (consonant and vowel system). The second chapter focuses on the nominal system of the language. The third chapter deals with the verbal system. The fourth chapter examines the negation forms in the language. The fifth chapter deals with the basic syntactic features of Wolof. Finally, the book provides a Wolof text with an interlinear translation.

ISBN 9783895866166. Languages of the World/Materials 333. 112pp. 2003.