Announcing: A GRAMMAR OF LELE

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

A GRAMMAR OF LELE; Zygmunt Frajzyngier(University of Colorado); paper
ISBN: 1-57586-257-3, $44.95, 511 pages. CSLI Publications 2001.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:
Inadvertently, African languages have been neglected by many of those
performing research in the field of linguistics. In an attempt to
expand and diversify the research base of African languages, a
handful of linguists have begun to focus their attention on
lesser-known languages.

A Grammar of Lele is the first book ever written on Lele, an
endangered language spoken in the Republic of Chad. The language
belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, whose other
members are Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic, Omotic, and Berber. This
book explores the use of vowel harmony as a means of coding
categories of morphemes. Suffixes undergo vowel harmony rules;
clitics do not, and must occur in specified contexts; free morphemes,
which also do not undergo vowel harmony rules, have relatively free
distribution. The language has also an intriguing reference system,
complex sentence structures, and the coding of backgrounding. The
study of these and other categories and structures not encountered in
the more familiar Indo-European languages will appeal to lovers of
languages and linguistics.