Browsing by Subject "Language description"
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Item A descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo)(2010-12) Lidz, Liberty A.; Woodbury, Anthony C.; England, Nora; Epps, Patience; Zhang, Qing; Thurgood, Graham; Crowhurst, MeganThis dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description and documentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language's features and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analyticity; zero anaphora; OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; a conjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics; prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization and associated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsarten, adverbials, and discourse context; and the Daba shamanic register.Item Kakua phonology : first approach(2010-12) Bolaños Quiñónez, Katherine Elizabeth; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Woodbury, AnthonyThis work presents a preliminary analysis of the phonology of Kakua, an endangered language of the Kakua-Nukak family (formerly classified as Makú). Kakua is spoken by approximately 300 people living in the Vaupés region of the Amazon rain forest, in northwest Amazonia, Eastern Colombia. This analysis is based on data collected with Kakua speakers from the village of Wacará, a settlement of approximately 120 people, living along the basin of Caño Wacará, located between the Querarí and the Vaupés Rivers, to the east of Mitú, close to the Colombia-Brazil borders. The phonological inventory of Kakua includes five vowels and seventeen consonants. Kakua also presents contrastive prosodic features of nasalization and an inventory of three contrastive tones. Kakua phonology presents various interesting typological features from both areal and cross-linguistic perspective. The work presented here is a first attempt to provide a better illustration of a little-known endangered language of Amazonia.