Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical linguistics, and function-based approaches to language description define this volume, as does its foci in two major geographical areas southeast Asia and northwestern North America. All of the papers appeal, in one way or another, to functional-historical approaches to explanation. Behind this appeal lies an assumption that languages are selective in their development in ways that are dependent upon the communicative tasks to which they are put. As such, language function accounts...

A grammar of Kurtop is the first descriptive grammar of Kurtop, a threatened language of Bhutan, and the only reference grammar of any East Bodish language. The East Bodish languages are a relatively unstudied branch of the larger Tibeto-Burman family, situated in Bhutan and neighbouring regions in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. The chapters introduce the language and the people who speak in a historical context and then go on to detail the synchronic and diachronic phonology, discuss word classes and cause structure, morphosyntax and syntax, and illustrate rich system of evidentiality...