A Grammar of Kham

This is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal.

David E. Watters (Author)

9780521120517, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 October 2009

504 pages
24.4 x 17 x 2.6 cm, 0.8 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Regional studies [GTB], Linguistics [CF]