Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages

Argument structure of Kashmiri is a study of the grammatical patterns one finds in the Indo-Aryan language Kashmiri. Kashmiri shows several unique linguistic features which sets it aside from more well-known Indo-Aryan languages. The book focuses on the grammatical relations and their coding in case marking and in verb agreement. The occurrence of pronominal suffixation in Kashmiri is related with the universal feature of referential hierarchies and the phenomenon of verb second word order. The grammatical structure of Kashmiri is situated in the linguistic area of the Himalayas, and minority languages in the area are discussed as well. The book draws on a wealth of examples from field work, local manuscripts and secondary sources and it is a first comprehensive overview of the grammatical features of Kashmiri from a typological point of view.

The Kurux Language: Grammar, Texts and Lexicon by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey is a comprehensive description of Kurux, a northern Dravidian tribal language with two million speakers. Isolated in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Eastern India, Kurux shows a unique mixture of archaic Dravidian traits and innovations induced by contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, and has posed questions regarding language change and Dravidian subgrouping.

Making use of first-hand materials from their fieldwork, Kobayashi and Tirkey analyze the complexities of the language in the grammar section. This book also contains transcribed and glossed texts, and a lexicon with more than 9,000 entries, and serves both as reference for linguists and learning resource for students.

A Functional Account of Marathi's Voice Phenomena offers a comprehensive account of the formal and semantic aspects of the two most prominent voice phenomena in Marathi: the passive and the causative. Previous studies offer many partial insights into various aspects of Marathi’s passives and causatives. However, a comprehensive description of the formal, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of Marathi’s passives and causatives as not been available so far. Attempting to fill this gap, the present monograph offers a description in the functional-typological framework. At the same time it introduces the reader to the rich tradition of grammatical studies in Marathi, which up to now have remained inaccessible to those who are unfamiliar with the language.

In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of light verb constructions in Persian. By clustering constructions based on semantic properties, she provides an insightful and more global view of a system that has been notoriously difficult to classify.

Using diagrams as visual aids, Neiloufar Family takes a novel, bottom-up approach to analysing the light verb system, starting from small sets of constructions and mapping out consistent patterns. Her analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the structure of semantic spaces within the verbal system in Persian, and other languages that use light verbs. This research provides a blueprint for understanding existing verbal constructions and productively creating new ones.

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

Winner of the 2015 Kenneth L. Hale Award!
A Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language is the first-ever detailed and exhaustive account of Great Andamanese, a moribund language spoken on the Andamanese Islands belonging to India in the Bay of Bengal. This important documentation covers all major areas of the grammar of Great Andamanese and gives us a first detailed look at this unique language, which is on the verge of extinction. Of particular interest here is the discussion of the body division class markers which play an important role throughout much of the grammar and which are documented in this volume for the first time. The volume will be of interest for general linguists from the fields of linguistic typology and areal linguistics as well as those interested in South Asian languages in general.

In The Genesis of Sri Lanka Malay: A Case of Extreme Language Contact, the synchrony and diachrony of Sri Lanka Malay are investigated from a variety of angles: Experts on South Asia, South East Asia, Creole Studies, Areal Linguistics, Typology, and Sociolinguistics all contribute their share to a truly global analysis of one of the most extreme cases of language contact, where the Malays changed the whole morphosyntax of their language in as little as just over three centuries.
The genesis of Sri Lanka Malay informs theories of language contact, language change, and 'creolization', as well as sociolinguistics, language policy and planning and a critical analysis of the 'endangered language' discourse.

The book was co-edited by Brian Spooner, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Language policy in Central Asia, Afghanistan and the immediately surrounding neighboring countries has a long and varied history. The Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 have left the area in a state of flux. This volume gives a better picture about what is official and explicit, what is not official but implicit or general practice, and what the likely future developments might be. It is very clear that multilingualism, whether it involves Persian, Russian or English in addition to other languages, not only has long been a part of the scene, but will probably continue to be so.

Kharia, spoken in central-eastern India, is a member of the southern branch of the Munda family, which forms the western branch of the Austro-Asiatic phylum, stretching from central India to Vietnam. The present study provides the most extensive description of Kharia to date and covers all major areas of the grammar. Of particular interest in the variety of Kharia described here, is that there is no evidence for assuming the existence of parts-of-speech, such as noun, adjective and verb. Rather functions such as reference, modification and predication are expressed by one of two syntactic structures, referred to here as 'syntagmas'. The volume will be of equal interest to general linguists from the fields of typology, linguistic theory, areal linguistics, Munda linguistics as well as South Asianists in general.