Full Description
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.
Contents
1. The people and their language; 2. Segmental phonology; 3. Tonology; 4. Nouns and noun morphology; 5. Verbs and verb morphology; 6. Modifiers and adjectivals; 7. Locatives, dimensionals and temporal adverbs; 8. Adverbs and adverbials; 9. Minor word classes; 10. Noun phrases, nominalizations and relative clauses; 11. Simple clauses, transitivity and voice; 12. Tense, aspect and modality; 13. The modality of certainty, obligation, unexpected information; 14. Non-declarative speech acts; 15. Interclausal relations and sentence structure; 16. Nominalized verb forms in discourse; 17. The Kham verb in historical perspective; 18. Texts; 19. Vocabulary; References.
