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Description:
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"A Carib grammar and dictionary", originally a Leiden University Ph.D.
dissertation, contains a 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.
This Carib grammar and dictionary is of interest to scholars in the fields
of linguistic typology, comparative Cariban linguistics, Carib dialects,
and to anyone who is curious to know more about the Carib language of South
America.
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