A Grammar Of Tshangla

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.

"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.

A Grammar of Bjokapakha by Selin Grollmann constitutes the first description of Bjokapakha, an endangered language spoken in central Bhutan belonging to the Tshangla branch of Trans-Himalayan. This grammar comprises a description of the phonology, lexicon, nominal morphology, predicate structures and syntax. In addition to the descriptive parts, this book encompasses a historical-comparative account of Bjokapakha. The introductory chapter provides a comparison with the standard variety of Tshangla and corroborates the internal diversity of the Tshangla branch. The present-day structure of Bjokapakha verbal morphology is illuminated by means of an internal reconstruction. Moreover, this book contains a glossary and a text collection.

A grammar of Kurtöp presents the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of northeastern Bhutan. When possible, data are presented in a comparative light, lending insight into the development of phenomena such as tonogenesis and nominalizations.

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.

The volume Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa) is a comprehensive description of Duhumbi, the language spoken by the Duhumbi (Chugpa, Chug Monpa) people of Dirang circle West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself. To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respected linguists who publish their research in leading academic outlets. Furthermore, each chapter in this collection contains new, cutting-edge results based on the latest trends in the field. Hence, no other extant piece of literature matches this volume in terms of its breadth and coverage of issues, all converging on the common theme of sonority. Given the wide variety of subtopics in this collection, there is something to appeal to everyone — the list of contributions encompasses areas such as Optimality Theory, acquisition, computational modeling, acoustic phonetics, typology, syllable structure, speech perception, markedness, connectionism, psycholinguistics, and even MRI technology. What ties all of these issues together is a solid and consistent emphasis on sonority as a unified background phenomenon. Furthermore, a continuum of opinions about sonority is represented, ranging from complete acceptance and enthusiasm, on the one hand, to moderate skepticism on the other hand.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.