A Carib grammar and dictionary

This dissertation contains a new detailed description of Carib grammar and the most extensive inventory of Carib lexemes and affixes so far. It is based on the work of previous researchers and a decade of field work carried out by the author, mainly in Galibi, a Carib village in eastern Suriname. The Carib language is spoken by some 7000 people living in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil. This book distinguishes four dialects: Venezuelan Carib, Guyanese Carib, western Surinamese Carib, and eastern Surinamese Carib which includes French Guianese and Brazilian Carib. Interesting features of the description are (a) a new phonological analysis, including details on stress and stress patterns, (b) a morphological analysis, including among other things a hitherto undescribed tense/aspect morpheme as well as new explanations of many details, (c) a presentation of five syntactic word units, (d) dozens of pages containing texts with an interlinear morphological analysis and translation, and (e) a dictionary containing information on more than 6500 words. Information about the four dialects has been incorporated in the grammar and dictionary. A new supradialectal orthography is used and suggested as fit for all Carib dialects.LEI Universiteit LeidenAsian Studie

Linguistic, cultural, and environmental aspects of ethnoprimatological knowledge among the Lokono, Kari'na, and Warao of the Moruca River (Guyana)

FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach