New paperback grammar

[Alexandra Aikhenvald]

Title: A grammar of Tariana, from northwest Amazonia 
Series Title: Cambridge Grammatical descriptions

Publication Yea of paperback reissue: 2006 
Publisher: Cmbridge University Press
	   http:/www.cambridge.org
	
http:/www.cambridge.org/9780521826648

Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

paperback: ISBN-13 978-0-521-02886-8 pb
		ISBN-10 0-521-02886-8 pb

		735 pp, £40.00

This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.


Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald, PhD, DLitt, FAHA
Associate Director and Postgraduate Coordinator
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
La Trobe University
Victoria 3086
Tel: 61-(0)3-9479 6402
Fax: 61-(0)3-9467 3053
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald.htm