A Grammar of Semelai
Semelai is a previously undescribed and endangered Aslian (Mon-Khmer) language of the Malay Peninsula. This book - the first in-depth description of an Aslian language - provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Semelai. Semelai intertwines two types of morphological system: a concatenative system of prefixes, suffixes and a circumfix - acquired through extended contact with Malay - and a nonconcatenative system of prefixes and infixes (including infix reduplication), inherited from Mon-Khmer. There are distinctive word classes - Nominals, Verbs and Expressives - the latter iconic utterances which simultaneously provide information about the predicate and its arguments. Semelai has many derivational processes which change word class or affect transitivity, and it combines both head-marking and dependent-marking profiles. It also has a rich phonemic system of 20 vowels and 32 consonants. Nicole Kruspe's discussion is complemented with a generous number of illustrative examples and texts, creating a reference work that will be welcomed by descriptivists and typologists alike.
What people are saying - Write a review
We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.
Phonology and phonotactics
personal ignorative and demonstrative
The noun phrase
Prepositions and the prepositional phrase
Grammatical relations constituent order and coding strategies
adverb affix allomorph areh Aslian languages aspectual AT:above AT:below attested Bera child clitic co-occur coda copy COMP complement concatenated consonant constituent construction context deictic derived Diffloth discourse discussed enclitic entity epenthesis event existential clause express final syllable fish following example function glottal husband imperative infix interrogative intransitive verbs irrealis Jakun jtek kadeh kahn khlan khlarj knon lagi lexemes lexical locative preposition Malay marker modified Mon-Khmer Mon-Khmer languages monosyllabic morpheme morphological nasal NEG EXIST NEG:IMP negator nominal nominalisation noun occur offspring onset Orang Asli penultimate syllable phonemes phonologically phrase position post-verbal predicate prefix proclitic pronominal proclitic pronouns QUOTE realised reduplication referent s.th sampay semantic Semelai sibling someone speaker stative swak swidden syllable coda syllable onset syntactic Temiar Temoq template third person tiger transitive clause verbal vowel wife word