Kharia, spoken in central-eastern India, is a member of the southern branch of the Munda family, which forms the western branch of the Austro-Asiatic phylum, stretching from central India to Vietnam. The present study provides the most extensive description of Kharia to date and covers all major areas of the grammar. Of particular interest in the variety of Kharia described here, is that there is no evidence for assuming the existence of parts-of-speech, such as noun, adjective and verb. Rather functions such as reference, modification and predication are expressed by one of two syntactic...

In The Genesis of Sri Lanka Malay: A Case of Extreme Language Contact, the synchrony and diachrony of Sri Lanka Malay are investigated from a variety of angles: Experts on South Asia, South East Asia, Creole Studies, Areal Linguistics, Typology, and Sociolinguistics all contribute their share to a truly global analysis of one of the most extreme cases of language contact, where the Malays changed the whole morphosyntax of their language in as little as just over three centuries. The genesis of Sri Lanka Malay informs theories of language contact, language change, and 'creolization', as...

Winner of the 2015 Kenneth L. Hale Award A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language is the first-ever detailed and exhaustive account of Great Andamanese, a moribund language spoken on the Andamanese Islands belonging to India in the Bay of Bengal. This important documentation covers all major areas of the grammar of Great Andamanese and gives us a first detailed look at this unique language, which is on the verge of extinction. Of particular interest here is the discussion of the body division class markers which play an important role throughout much of the grammar and which...

In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of light verb constructions in Persian. By clustering constructions based on semantic properties, she provides an insightful and more global view of a system that has been notoriously difficult to classify. Using diagrams as visual aids, Neiloufar Family takes a novel, bottom-up approach to analysing the light verb system, starting from small sets of constructions and mapping out consistent patterns. Her analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the structure of semantic spaces within the...

A Functional Account of Marathi's Voice Phenomena offers a comprehensive account of the formal and semantic aspects of the two most prominent voice phenomena in Marathi: the passive and the causative. Previous studies offer many partial insights into various aspects of Marathi's passives and causatives. However, a comprehensive description of the formal, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of Marathi's passives and causatives as not been available so far. Attempting to fill this gap, the present monograph offers a description in the functional-typological framework. At the same time it...

The Kurux Language: Grammar, Texts and Lexicon by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey is a comprehensive description of Kurux, a northern Dravidian tribal language with two million speakers. Isolated in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Eastern India, Kurux shows a unique mixture of archaic Dravidian traits and innovations induced by contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, and has posed questions regarding language change and Dravidian subgrouping. Making use of first-hand materials from their fieldwork, Kobayashi and Tirkey analyze the complexities of the language in the...

Argument structure of Kashmiri is a study of the grammatical patterns one finds in the Indo-Aryan language Kashmiri. Kashmiri shows several unique linguistic features which sets it aside from more well-known Indo-Aryan languages. The book focuses on the grammatical relations and their coding in case marking and in verb agreement. The occurrence of pronominal suffixation in Kashmiri is related with the universal feature of referential hierarchies and the phenomenon of verb second word order. The grammatical structure of Kashmiri is situated in the linguistic area of the Himalayas, and minority...

Beṭṭa Kurumba is a Dravidian language spoken in the Nilgiri and Waynad Hills of India. Annotated Texts in Beṭṭa Kurumba presents folktales and dialogues in this language, together with a grammatical sketch and a glossary. These interlinearised texts provide rich data for linguistic analysis, as well as some of the earliest published cultural information about a highly understudied ethnic group. The cultural information is presented, for the most part, by the Beṭṭa Kurumbas themselves, who speak in their own native language about aspects of their lifestyle, spiritual beliefs, and...

Atong Texts by Seino van Breugel consists of a collection of 37 glossed, annotated and translated narratives in the Atong language (Tibeto-Burman) of Meghalaya, India, presented in phonemic standard orthography. This testimony of cultural and linguistic heritage of the Atongs, who are members of the Garo Tribe, complements the author’s Grammar of Atong, also published by Brill. Each text is preceded by a systematic literary analysis. The photos in the appendix provide a visual impression of the environment in which the stories are told. This book is of great value to Tibeto-Burmanists,...

Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area offers the first comprehensive account of this important understudied word class from synchronic, diachronic, literary, and descriptive perspectives. The work contains studies from the four major language families of South Asia (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman) and covers domains in semantics, morphosyntax, and phonotactics. It also includes studies from literature and film that show how expressive form and function are embedded in performative contexts. Finally, the volume also contains first of its kind data from several...