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A Grammar of Kham (Cambridge Grammatical Descriptions)

A Grammar of Kham (Cambridge Grammatical Descriptions)

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David E. Watters
Cambridge University Press, 2002-11-14
EAN 9780521812450, ISBN10: 0521812453

Hardcover, 504 pages, 24.9 x 17.8 x 3.6 cm
Language: English

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.