The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-960069-4
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 732 Seiten, Format (B × H): 169 mm x 247 mm, Gewicht: 1138 g

This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dixon, R.M.W.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Ethnolinguistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: Introduction: The Language and its Speakers

- 2: Phonology

- 3: Grammatical Overview

- 4: Predicate Structure - General

- 5: Predicate Structure - Miscellaneous Suffixes

- 6: Predicate Structure - The Tense-Modal System

- 7: Predicate Structure - Secondary Verbs, Mood, and Negation

- 8: Verbal Derivations - Causative and Applicative

- 9: Verbal Reduplication

- 10: Noun Phrase Structure

- 11: Possessed Nouns and Adjectives

- 12: Demonstratives and Related Forms

- 13: Copula Clauses

- 14: Structure of a Verbal Main Clause

- 15: Commands and Questions

- 16: A-Contructions and O-Constructions

- 17: Complement Clauses

- 18: Dependent Clauses

- 19: Nominalised Clauses

- 20: Peripheral Marker jaa and ni-jaa

- 21: Other Peripheral Markers

- 22: The Relational Noun ihi/ehene 'Due to, Because of'

- 23: List Constructions

- 24: Syntactic Organisation

- 25: Word Class Derivations

- 26: Topics in Semantics

- 27: Prehistory

Über Autor(innen)

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University. His pioneering fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal languages began in the 1960s and led, among many other works, to grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiñ, culminating in Australian Languages: Their nature and development (CUP 2002). His other books include A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (U Chicago Press 1988), Ergativity (CUP, 1994), The Rise and Fall of Languages (CUP 1997) and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (OUP 2005). The hardback edition of The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP 2004) was winner of the 2004-5 Leonard Bloomfield Prize,