基本説明
New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2004. Winner of the 2006 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award! R. M. W. Dixon, author of acclaimed grammars of Australian Aboriginial languages and Fijian, here describes the hauntingly complex structure of Jarawara, spoken by just 170 Indians.
Full Description
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.
Contents
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
