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Description:
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This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak
language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its
speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as
a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this
rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited
from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but
unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the
language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex
serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and
double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality:
every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the
information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the
speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable
source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.
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