1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788827303321

Autore

Dienst Stefan

Titolo

A grammar of Kulina / / Stefan Dienst

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter Mouton, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

3-11-039537-1

3-11-034191-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (330 p.)

Collana

Mouton Grammar Library, , 0933-7636 ; ; Volume 66

Classificazione

EE 7458

Disciplina

498.3

Soggetti

Culina language - Grammar

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- Abbreviations, symbols and conventions -- Summary -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Phonetics and phonology -- 3. Nouns -- 4. Dynamic verbs -- 5. Stative verbs -- 6. Adjectives -- 7. Other word classes -- 8. Possession -- 9. Noun phrases -- 10. Copula, verbless and existential clauses -- 11. Verbal main clauses -- 12. Clause embedding and coordination -- 13. Adverbial clauses -- 14. Word formation -- 15. Lexicon -- Text 1 -- Text 2 -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book is a reference grammar of Kulina, an Amazonian language spoken in Brazil and Peru. The dialect described by the author is spoken on the upper Purus River in the Brazilian state of Acre. Kulina belongs to the Arawan language family. It is predominantly head-marking and has a complex verbal morphology which is largely agglutinating with some instances of fusion. The language has two noun classes and two genders. The gender agreement of transitive verbs with their arguments is in part governed by intricate grammatical rules and in part pragmatically driven. There are three types of possession, alienable, inalienable, and kinship. The latter category only applies to some kinship nouns, while others are alienably possessed. Kulina has aspirated and unaspirated obstruents, but different aspirated obstruents do not co-occur in one morpheme due to



Grassmann's law, a dissimilation process known from Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. The book contains two Kulina texts and a chapter on the lexicon, which discusses colour terms, generic nouns for plants and animals, pet vocatives, idioms, and the origin of loan words.