A Grammar Of Kham

First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.

A Grammar of Darma provides a comprehensive description of this threatened Tibeto-Burman language spoken in India’s Himalayan region. The description is based on a corpus that includes natural discourse and elicited data. The analysis is informed by a functional-typological framework.

"A Grammar of Tshangla" is the first major linguistic description of Tshangla, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Bhutan, northeast India, and southwest China. Written from a functional-typological perspective, it contains a wealth of illustrative examples both from elicited data and from spontaneously generated texts. It is a truly comprehensive description, including sections on phonology, lexicon, morphophonemics, morphosyntactic structure, clause-concatenating constructions, as well as discourse-pragmatic features. The volume will be of interest to language students, and to linguists and ethnographic scholars seeking to understand the Bhutanese and South Asian linguistic situation. The large amount of raw language data presented here make this "Grammar of Tshangla" an indispensable tool for students of Tibeto-Burman comparative linguistics and morphosyntactic theory in general.

This grammar provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Yakkha, a Sino-Tibetan language of the Kiranti branch. Yakkha is spoken by about 14,000 speakers in eastern Nepal, in the Sankhuwa Sabha and Dhankuta districts. The grammar is based on original fieldwork in the Yakkha community. Its primary source of data is a corpus of 13,000 clauses from narratives and naturally-occurring social interaction which the author recorded and transcribed between 2009 and 2012. Corpus analyses were complemented by targeted elicitation. The grammar is written in a functional-typological framework. It focusses on morphosyntactic and semantic issues, as these present highly complex and comparatively under-researched fields in Kiranti languages. The sequence of the chapters follows the well-established order of phonological, morphological, syntactic and discourse-structural descriptions. These are supplemented by a historical and sociolinguistic introduction as well as an analysis of the complex kinship terminology. Topics such as verbal person marking, argument structure, transitivity, complex predication, grammatical relations, clause linkage, nominalization, and the topography-based orientation system have received in-depth treatment. Wherever possible, the structures found were explained in a historical-comparative perspective in order to shed more light on how their particular properties have emerged.

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.

A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author’s fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The languages of this region remain under-documented for a number of historical reasons. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the widespread cultural practice of head-hunting discouraged outsiders from entering the Naga Hills. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, an armed rebellion by Naga separatists and a government policy of restricting access to the troubled area ensured that Nagaland remained a difficult place to conduct research. In this context, A Grammar of Mongsen Ao offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory. This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.