LINGUIST List 12.3115

Mon Dec 17 2001

Books: Grammars

Editor for this issue: Richard John Harvey <richardlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Christine Sosa, Grammar: A Grammar of Lele, Zygmunt Frajzyngier

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

A GRAMMAR OF LELE; Zygmunt Frajzyngier(University of Colorado);
Paper ISBN: 1-57586-257-3, $44.95, 511 pages.
CSLI Publications 2001. 
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search feature
to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

Inadvertently, African languages have been neglected by many of those
performing research in the field of linguistics. In an attempt to
expand and diversify the research base of African languages, a handful
of linguists have begun to focus their attention on lesser-known
languages.

A Grammar of Lele is the first book ever written on Lele, an
endangered language spoken in the Republic of Chad. The language
belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, whose other
members are Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic, Omotic, and Berber. This book
explores the use of vowel harmony as a means of coding categories of
morphemes. Suffixes undergo vowel harmony rules; clitics do not, and
must occur in specified contexts; free morphemes, which also do not
undergo vowel harmony rules, have relatively free distribution. The
language has also an intriguing reference system, complex sentence
structures, and the coding of backgrounding. The study of these and
other categories and structures not encountered in the more familiar
Indo-European languages will appeal to lovers of languages and
linguistics.