A grammar of Atong / / by Seino van Breugel.

• Superior document: Brill's studies in South and Southwest Asian languages, volume 5
• Author: Breugel, Seino van.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Brill's studies in South and Southwest Asian languages ; v. 5.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (700 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. Seino van Breugel provides a deep and thorough coverage and analysis of all major areas of the grammar, which makes this book of great interest and value to general linguists and typologists as well as area specialists. Alongside an Atong-English dictionary and five fully-glossed Atong texts recorded during extensive fieldwork, this work also provides a sizable ethnolinguistic introduction to the speakers and their culture. Of particular interest is the pragmatic approach taken for the grammatical analysis. Whereas the form of an utterance provides some clue as to its possible meaning, inference is always needed to arrive at the most relevant interpretation within the context in which the utterance occurs. \'This is a very important book for South Asian and Sino-Tibetan linguistic scholarship. Of the 200 languages of Northeast India, only a handful have been documented; the present work brings the number of full-scale modern grammars for these languages to six. Thus it represents a unique and extremely valuable contribution.\' Professor Scott DeLancey University of Oregon \'This is a solid academic work which makes a huge contribution to the field. There is no other detailed account of this particular language, and it is highly doubtful that anyone will write something more comprehensive in the future.\' Dr Willem de Reuse University of North Texas

Table of Contents

The Atong language and its speakers -- Phonology -- Word classes: an overview -- Verbs and verb/nouns -- Adjectives -- Nouns, the noun phrase and the nominal clump -- Kinship terms -- Deictic words -- Interrogatives -- Indefinite preforms -- The quantifier phrase, numerals and other quantifiers -- Classifiers -- Postpositions -- Discourse connectives -- Other word classes -- Sub-class-changing derivation -- Phrasal enclitics -- Semantic-role marking -- Pragmatic-role and specificity enclitics -- The predicate -- Derivational suffixes -- Predicate enclitics -- The clause, clause types and illocutionary force -- The factitive enclitic =wa , subordination and nominalization -- Goal-marked predicates -- Temporal-location and conditional clauses -- Concomitant-action clauses -- Adverbial and sequential clauses.