This book is the first comprehensive grammatical description of Uchumataqu, the lost language of the Uru of Lake Titicaca in north-western Bolivia . The Uchumataqu language became extinct around 1950 and although several researchers had documented the language during the first half of the 20 th century, their results were never considered in a comprehensive context. Some of the most ample studies even remained unpublished.

Furthermore, this book is the first to take into consideration every study on the Uchumataqu language. The grammatical description is based on former publications and archive material on this language and seeks to provide an insight in Uchumataqu as comprehensive as possible. The study comprises a detailed description of the data source situation as well as an introduction to the research carried out by those investigators who provide the data base for the present book. It includes a description of the phonological system of Uchumataqu as well as a presentation of its morphological processes. The nominal and verbal systems are discussed in detail. Particular attention is paid to the complex person-marking system of Uchumataqu, of which person-marking clitics are a vital part that distinguishes Uchumataqu from the neighbouring Aymara and Quechua language. Another important issue are nominalisation and subordination strategies as well as adjectives which form a word class of its own.

Uchumataqu forms part of the isolated language family Uru-Chipaya but has been influenced to differing degrees by Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish. The relation Uchumataqu has to the surrounding Aymara and Quechua language, and particularly the way in which influence on Uchumataqu was exerted, are described in detail.

The appendices contain a transcription of the afore unpublished manuscripts of Max Uhle and Walter Lehmann on Uchumataqu as well as a comparative and diachronic dictionary.

This book is aimed at linguists from all disciplines but is of equal interest to anthropologists, Americanists, historical linguists, typologists, and linguists with a special interest in Andean studies. It is not only an important contribution to the study of Andean languages and their interrelationship, but also an account for the descendants of the last Uchumataqu speakers of their lost language.
(In English, 304 pp.)

This book is first and foremost a grammatical description of Baure, a seriously endangered language from Bolivian Amazonia. Baure belongs to the Southern Arawak language family and it forms part of the Guaporé-Mamoré linguistic area. This book is the first detailed and comprehensive grammatical description of Baure, covering its phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse stucture. It is based on the author's extensive fieldwork in Bolivia in 2003, 2004, and 2006. The book furthermore addresses the historical, cultural, and sociolinguistic background of the speakers of Baure.

Special attention is given to th e complex (morpho)phonological processes within a phonological phrase, the rich noun classification system, the distinction of verbal and non-verbal predicates with respect to the argument marking pattern, the three-level distinction of verbal morphology, and specific clause types based on different nominalization strategies, which also play an important role in clause subordination. The relation to the surrounding Southern Arawak languages Trinitario, Ignaciano, and Paunaca is investigated through comparison of the lexicon and the grammar.

The appendices contain different text types, lists of grammatical morphemes, classifiers, and the Swadesh 200 word list. It is a highly valuable addition to our knowledge of South American languages and cultures in general and the Arawak languages in particular. This book is aimed at linguists from all backgrounds and is of special interest to typologists, historical linguists, Arawakanists, Americanists, and anthropologists. It is also an important record of a dying language for its speech community and their descendants.
(In English, 480 pp., ill.)

About the author

Swintha Danielsen studied English Linguistics, Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Hanover and received her Magister degree with a thesis on article and aspect in English and English-based Creoles. She participated in the LEXIKURS-project at the University of Hanover and obtained a doctoral scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands to carry out research on the Baure language and more in general on comparative issues concerning Arawak languages in Bolivia.

The studies gathered together in this book were originally presented at two conferences sponsored by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), which were held at the VU University Amsterdam, in late August 2004.

The first part Language Endangerment and Endangered Languages deals with issues related to language endangerment and the problems linguists and other researchers encounter when documenting these languages, both in general terms and with an eye on the Andean/Amazonian situation.

The second part, Specific Studies: Languages and Cultures of the Andean-Amazonian Border Area, contains three sections. The first deals with topics that relate to the Maku peoples and languages of Brazil (Eastern Maku) and Colombia ( Western Maku ). The second section features papers that address anthropological and grammatical issues concerning the Nambikwara peoples and languages (Brazil). The third section discusses various other languages in the Andean/Amazonian border area.

Content of this book

The editor of the book, Leo Wetzels, was recently appointed as a research director (directeur de recherche) at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)/Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, in Paris. He has retained a part-time appointment as Professor of Romance and Amazonian languages at the VU University Amsterdam to supervise his PhD students, who are working mainly on endangered South-American languages. His personal research is directed towards questions of phonological and morphological typology, for which the properties of the Amazonian languages play a decisive role, and the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese.

Manado Malay is the language of the Indonesian city of Manado. This book presents an overview of the grammar of this language, with particular attention to discourse particles and intonation, and studies how these phenomena are used to mark focus.
The first part of the book gives a description of the grammar, based on a corpus of spontaneous conversations. It presents the main aspects of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. One chapter is devoted to discourse particles, which are used frequently in this language. Another chapter discusses intonation, a much neglected topic in the study of Indonesian languages.
The second part of the book is concerned with information structure. It presents a number of experiments that were run to test the compatibility of various constituent orders and focus structures. Other experiments were carried out to investigate which discourse particles mark focus and to define the position of the sentence accent for a given focus structure.
This book will be of interest to linguists working on information structure or intonation, as well as to typologists and students of Indonesian languages.

(In English, 282 pp. incl. appendices)

The Linguist List has published a review of this book.

From the review in Bijdragen KITLV 162.4 (2006): '(...) researchers cannot afford to ignore this important contribution to the study of Malay and Malayic languages.' (Don van Minde)

This book is about Peking Mandarin, the dialect of Peking, which despite its official status as the spoken foundation of the national language of China, remains largely unexplored to date. Based on a large collection of spoken data from native speakers of Peking Mandarin, it comments on the ways Peking natives use to refer to time, focusing mainly on phenomena which are underrepresented in the linguistic literature. The description concentrates on aspectual particles. Usages that are newly attested in the data are compared to existing accounts of Mandarin, raising issues of polysemy and homonymy for each of these particles. Both synchronic and diachronic aspects are examined. It is demonstrated that some forms that have been considered extinct in Mandarin are alive and kicking in the language of Peking.
(In English, 128 pp. incl. English and Dutch summaries)

'Cet ouvrage remarquablement clair inaugure le nouveau chantier pékinois sous les meilleurs auspices.' - Viviane Allenton in: Review of Bibliography in Sinology, Vol. XXI, 2003-2005, pp. 170-171

This book is a pioneering study of Maale, a so far undescribed Omotic language spoken in southern Ethiopia. The study presents an analysis of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. Focus, ideophones, interjections and greeting and leave-taking expressions are also examined.
The author describes a number of interesting morpho-syntactic phenomena including the expression of modality, clause-chaining and switch-reference. One of the theoretical problems raised concerns the marking of case on dependent verbs in Maale, which is at variance with the accepted way of categorising inflectional affixes into verbal and nominal classes. New empirical material is also provided in the area of sentence-type marking. Maale uses morphological means to distinguish the declarative, which is generally regarded as an unmarked sentence type. The declarative in this language further distinguishes simple assertions from assertions involving the speakers’ state of knowledge (the mirative), his/her commitment to the utterance (the veridical), his/her evaluation of the state of knowledge of the hearer (the informative), and the potential. In addition to this, assertions about states, e.g. quality or identity of a referent, are distinct from assertions about events.
The analytical and theoretical problems addressed in different sections of the book make it interesting to specialists in Omotic studies as well as to those concerned with linguistics in general.
(In English, 318 pp.)

'This is an excellent study of an otherwise little-known language, that hopefully will form the model for future descriptions of languages of the region, and is to be all the more welcomed as being the work of one of an emerging generation of young Ethiopian linguists.'

David L. Appleyard in: School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 67/1 (Febr. 2004)

Changana forms part of the Tsonga group of Bantu languages, together with Tshwa and Ronga and is spoken in Mozambique. This book presents a systematic description and classification of verbs of motion in Changana, and also includes a long list of these verbs.

(In English, 244 pp. incl. bibl.)