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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
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new
perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes
state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across
theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new
insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary
perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for
cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in
its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards
linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as
well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for
a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the
ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes
monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes,
which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from
different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality
standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.
An introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea, numbering over 700 and forming around sixty distinct language families.
The key argument of this book, originally published in 1984, is
that when human beings communicate with each other by means of a
natural language they typically do not do so in simple sentences
but rather in connected discourse - complex expressions made up of
a number of clauses linked together in various ways. A necessary
precondition for intelligible discourse is the speaker's ability to
signal the temporal relations between the events that are being
discussed and to refer to the participants in those events in such
a way that it is clear who is being talked about. A great deal of
the grammatical machinery in a language is devoted to this task,
and Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar explores how different
grammatical systems accomplish it. This book is an important
attempt to integrate the study of linguistic form with the study of
language use and meaning. It will be of particular interest to
field linguists and those concerned with typology and language
universals, and also to anthropologists involved in the study of
language function.
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