A grammar of Teiwa / by Marian Klamer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Klamer, Margaretha Anna Flora.

Series:

Mouton grammar library ; 49.

Mouton grammar library ; 49

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tewa language (Papuan)--Grammar.

Tewa language (Papuan).

Papuan languages.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (558 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Teiwa is a non-Austronesian ('Papuan') language spoken on the island of Pantar, in eastern Indonesia, located just north of Timor island. It has approx. 4,000 speakers and is highly endangered. While the non-Austronesian languages of the Alor-Pantar archipelago are clearly related to each other, as indicated by the many apparent cognates and the very similar pronominal paradigms found across the group, their genetic relationship to other Papuan languages remains controversial. Located some 1,000 km from their putative Papuan neighbors on the New Guinea mainland, the Alor-Pantar languages are the most distant westerly Papuan outliers. A grammar of Teiwa presents a grammatical description of one of these 'outlier' languages. The book is structured as a reference grammar: after a general introduction on the language, it speakers and the linguistic situation on Alor and Pantar, the grammar builds up from a description of the language's phonology and word classes to its larger grammatical constituents and their mutual relations: nominal phrases, serial verb constructions, clauses, clause combinations, and information structure. While many Papuan languages are morphologically complex, Teiwa is almost analytic: it has only one paradigm of object marking prefixes, and one verbal suffix marking realis status. Other typologically interesting features of the language include: (i) the presence of uvular fricatives and stops, which is atypical for languages of eastern Indonesia; (ii) the absence of trivalent verbs: transitive verbs select a single (animate or inanimate) object, while the additional participant is expressed with a separate predicate; and (iii) the absence of morpho-syntactically encoded embedded clauses. A grammar of Teiwa is based on primary field data, collected by the author in 2003-2007. A selection of glossed and translated Teiwa texts of various genres and word lists (Teiwa-English / English-Teiwa) are included.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of contents

Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Phonology

Chapter 3. Word classes

Chapter 4. Grammatical relations

Chapter 5. The Noun Phrase

Chapter 6. Non-verbal clauses

Chapter 7. Verbal clauses: The marking of Reality status, Modality and Aspect

Chapter 8. Negative, interrogative, and imperative clauses

Chapter 9. Serial verb constructions

Chapter 10. Clause combinations

Chapter 11. Information structure

Appendix I. Texts

Appendix II. Word lists

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612673160

9781282673168

1282673165

9783110226072

3110226073

OCLC:

648711651