Boekhandel Douwes Den Haag

A Grammar of Akabea

Zamponi, Raoul (Independent Scholar) & Comrie, Bernard (Distinguished Faculty Professor of Linguistics, Distinguished Faculty Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara)

A Grammar of Akabea

A Grammar of Akabea

A Grammar of Akabea

 

This volume is the first extensive and reliable grammatical description of any traditional language of the Great Andamanese family. It makes valuable Akabea data accessible for the first time both to linguists and to interested scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and genetics.


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Beschrijving A Grammar of Akabea

This volume is the first extensive and reliable grammatical description of any traditional language of the Great Andamanese family. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and its phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The grammar is accompanied by an online appendix that provides a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman's Dialogues.
Raoul Zamponi and Bernard Comrie's Grammar of Akabea offers a unique insight into the culture, history, and prehistory of the Andaman Islands, and also broadens our understanding of the human capacity for language. It highlights the typologically interesting and cross-linguistically rare traits of the language, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The project at last makes this valuable evidence accessible both to linguists and to interested scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and genetics.


ISBN
9780198855798
Pagina's
464
Verschenen
NUR
610
Druk
1
Uitvoering
Hardback
Taal
Engels
Uitgever
OUP Oxford

Taal