Academic literature on the topic 'Descriptive grammar'

This thesis is a descriptive analysis of Wano, a Trans-New Guinea language found in West Papua which is spoken by approximately 7,000 native speakers. The thesis includes: (i) an introduction of Wano topography and demography; a brief ethnographic sketch; some sociolinguistic issues such as name taboo, counting system and kinship terms; and typological profile of the language in chapter 1; (ii) morphophonological properties in chapter 2; (iii) forms and functions of nouns in chapter 3; (iv) verbs in chapter 4; (v) deixis in chapter 5; (vi) clause elements in chapter 6; and (vii) intransitive/transitive non-verbal predication in chapter 7; (viii) clause combination is consecutively observed in terms of coordination and subordination in chapter 8; serial verb constructions in chapter 9; clause linking in chapter 10; and bridging linkage in chapter 11. Chapter 12 sums-up the overall thesis. Wano has 11 consonantal and 5 vocalic phonemes expressed through their allophonic variations, consonantal assimilation and vocalic diphthongs. The only fricative phoneme attested is bilabial fricative /Î2/. There are two open and two closed syllable patterns where all consonants are syllable-onset, while approximants can also be syllable-coda. Vowels are syllable-nucleus. Stress is syllable-final which will be penultimate in cliticization. The phonology-morphology interface provides a significant contribution to the shaping of conjugational verbs, which, in turn, plays an essential role to an understanding of Wano verbal system where distinction between roots, stems, citation forms, sequential forms and tense-aspect-mood is defined. Wano is a polysynthetic language that displays an agglutinative-fusional morphology. Although the alienable-inalienable noun distinction is essentially simple in its morphology, the sex-distinction of the possessor between kin terms allows room for semantic-pragmatic complexity in the interpretation of their various uses. Wano has four non-verbal predications, consists of experiential event, nominal, adjectival, and deictic predicates. Wano is a verb-final language that allows pronominal pro-drop and has no rigid word order for arguments. A clause may consist only of (i) a single verb, (ii) a single inalienable noun, (iii) a serial verb construction, (iv) a combination of an inalienable noun with a verb, and or (v) a combination of an inalienable noun with a serial verb construction. To maintain discourse coherency, Wano makes use of tail-head linkage construction. The thesis consists of: pre-sections (i-xxxiii), contents (1-478), bibliography (479-498), and appendices (499-594) that include verb paradigms, noun paradigms, some oral texts and dialectal wordlist.

Noon is a West-Atlantic language of the Cangin subgroup, spoken by 25 000 people in central Senegal, in and around the town of Thies. The aim of this study is to provide a full grammatical description of Noon, since no such study has been done on the language. We have not followed a specific linguistic model as framework, but rather tried to work from the classical approach of presenting the structures in the grammatical units of the language, from morphology to discourse, All analysis is presented with language examples from data collected in the Thies area over the years 1994-1998. The study is divided into 11 chapters, followed by a short interlinearised text sample with a free translation. The first chapter presents a brief overview of the phonology and the morphophonological processes that take place in affixation. Another important feature described in this section is the restricted regressive vowel harmony process, based on the ATR feature. In chapters 2-3, the nominal system is described, including the noun class system of 6 basic classes with which most nominals are in agreement. There is also a threefold locative distinction present in determined nominals. This locative distinction is further elaborated in the demonstratives. Chapter 4 treats prepositions and adverbs. In chapters 5-6, verbal morphology and the verb phrase are presented, A major feature of the Noon verb is the derivational affixation which, apart from carrying aspectual information, also has bearing on the valency of the verb. The conjugational system is based on affixation, but also on the use of auxiliaries and particles. Chapter 7 deals with conjunctions, particles and interjections, and chapter 8 treats clause structures: independent ones, both verbal and non-verbal, but also dependent clauses. In chapter 9, different simple sentence types are described, followed by the complex sentences, including serial and reduplicative types. Chapter 10 depicts some important features that occur on the discourse level such as the wider use of spatial deixis in temporal and textual references. Finally, in chapter 11 is presented a comparative view of some of the major dialect differences in Noon.

This study discusses the structure of Ateso, an Eastern Nilotic language. Based on interview and recorded data from fieldwork conducted in both Uganda and Kenya, where Ateso is spoken, the study provides the first comprehensive description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. The main findings of this study are as follows: The key feature of Ateso's phonological structure is that vowel alternation strategies are constrained by three harmony rules: root-control, feature-control, and, finally, mid-vowel assimilation. While Ateso shares this structure with the other Eastern Nilotic languages, it has its unique features as well. For example, while the other members of the Eastern Nilotic family have lost the vowel */ä/, Ateso has retained it phonetically. Ateso's noun morphology has noun-inflectional affixes associated with gender- and number marking. The language employs noun prefixes for gender and uses suffixes to express number and to derive words from others. With regard to its verbal morphology, Ateso verb forms are inflected for a variety of functions. Inflectional categories such as person, number, tense, aspect and mood are marked on the verb either segmentally or supra-segmentally. Tense is expressed suprasegmentally by tone on the nucleus of verb roots, while different morphemes mark person, number, aspect and mood. The discussion of Ateso verb morphology covers verbal derivations and extensions; namely, causatives, ventives, itives, datives, iterative, passives and instrumentals. Regarding its syntactic structure, as a VS/VO language, Ateso allows for a complete clause made up of an inflected verb only, or an inflected verb followed by one or two NPs/or an NP and a pronoun. The language can also have sentence structures involving strategies such as coordination, subordination and clause chaining.

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is primarily based on a corpus that was created during a total of fifteen months of original fieldwork, while building on and expanding on research reported by Grüßner in 1978. While the exact phylogenetic status of Karbi inside TB has remained controversial, this dissertation points out various putative links to other TB languages. The most intriguing aspect of Karbi phonology is the tone system, which carries a low functional load. While three tones can be contrasted on monosyllabic roots, the rich agglutinating morphology of Karbi allows the formation of polysyllabic words, at which level tones lose most of their phonemicity, while still leaving systematic phonetic traces. Nouns and verbs represent the two major word classes of Karbi at the root level; property-concept terms represent a subclass of verbs. At the heart of Karbi morphosyntax, there are two prefixes of Proto-TB provenance that have diachronically shaped the grammar of the language: the possessive prefix a- and the nominalizer ke-. Possessive a- attaches to nouns that are modified by preposed elements and represents the most frequent morpheme in the corpus. Nominalization involving ke- forms the basis for a variety of predicate constructions, including most of Karbi subordination as well as a number of main clause constructions. In addition to nominalization, subordination commonly involves clause chaining. Noun phrases may be marked for their clausal role via -phān `non-subject' or -lòng `locative' but frequently remain unmarked for role. Their pragmatic status can be indicated with information structure markers for topic, focus, and additivity. Commonly used discourse constructions include elaborate expressions and parallelism more generally, general extenders, copy verb constructions, as well as a number of final particles. Audio files are available of the texts given in the appendices, particular examples illustrating phonological issues, and phonetic recordings of tone minimal sets. Supplemental files are located at: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/13657

The Ugandan Deaf Community, consisting of approximately 25,000 sign language users, has seen significant developments in its recent history. Government recognition of sign language, establishment of schools for the deaf, and the beginnings of research into Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) have been important milestones. While Deaf Ugandans are entering university level education for the first time, a number of challenges to the community remain. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic structures of UgSL in order to produce a description of the language’s morphosyntax. There is a close relationship between word (or sign) properties and syntactic expressions, so UgSL is described here in terms of its morphosyntactic constructions, rather than a differentiation between morphological and syntactic features (cf. Croft 2001; Wilkinson 2013:260). While a substantial number of such descriptions exist for languages outside of Africa, this thesis is the first attempt at describing the morphosyntax of an African sign language. Many African sign languages are severely under-documented, and some are endangered. This study uses an inductive approach and a corpus-based methodology, examining how UgSL signers construct utterances of morphosyntactic complexity. The thesis is in three parts: part I is an introduction and overview of UgSL and also provides the theoretical and methodological background; part II provides a preliminary survey of UgSL grammar to provide a sider context for subsequent chapters; and part III is a detailed survey of five morphosyntactic domains of UgSL. The author is a native Deaf user of UgSL and a member of the Ugandan Deaf Community, as well as being fluent in several other sign languages and participating in international communities of Deaf people.