A Grammar of Jamsay / / Jeffrey Heath.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Heath, Jeffrey,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] , 45
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (735 p.)

Jamsay is the largest-population language among some twenty Dogon languages in Mali, West Africa. This is the first comprehensive grammar of any Dogon language, including a full tonology. The language is verb-final, with subject agreement on the verb and with no other case-marking. Its most striking feature is the morphosyntactically triggered use of stem-wide tone-contour overlays on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. All stems have a lexical tone contour such as H[igh], L[ow]-H, HL, or LHL with at least one H-tone. An exam of tone overlay is tone-dropping to stem-wide all-L. This is used for Perfective verbs (in the presence of a focalized constituent), and for a noun or adjective before an adjective. It is also used to mark the head NP in a relative clause (the head NP is not extracted, so this is the only direct indication of head NP status). The verb in a relative clause is morphologically a participle, agreeing with the head NP in humanness and number, rather than with the subject. "Intonation" is used grammatically. For example, NP conjunction 'X and Y' is expressed as X Y, without a conjunction, but with "dying-quail" intonation on both conjuncts.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Sketch -- 3 Phonology -- 4 Nominal, pronominal, and adjectival -- morphology -- 5 Nominal and adjectival compounds -- 6 Noun phrase structure -- 7 Coordination -- 8 Postpositions and adverbials -- 9 Verbal derivation -- 10 Verbal inflection -- 11 VP and predicate structure -- 12 Comparatives -- 13 Focalization and interrogation -- 14 Relativization -- 15 Verb (VP) chaining and adverbial clauses -- 16 Conditional constructions -- 17 Complement and purposive clauses -- 18 Anaphora -- 19 Grammatical pragmatics -- 20 Dialects -- Backmatter