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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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A Sketch Grammar of Kopar - A Language of New Guinea (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,400
Discovery Miles 34 000
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A Sketch Grammar of Kopar - A Language of New Guinea (Hardcover)
Series: Pacific Linguistics [PL]
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in
three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.
This is the only description of the language available. It also
discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the
structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was
necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a
description as possible of the grammatical structure of this
complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed
and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar.
It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison
and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations.
The grammar is written with the research interests of language
typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind.
Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative,
polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so
ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes.
Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like
future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes,
while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern
ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a
direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person
hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower
Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of
sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and
verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this
work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a
language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its
rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to
language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who
wants to explore the range of language variation
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