The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University. His pioneering fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal languages began in the 1960s and led, among many other works, to grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiñ, culminating in Australian Languages: Their nature and development (CUP 2002). His other books include A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (U Chicago Press 1988), Ergativity (CUP, 1994), The Rise and Fall of Languages (CUP 1997) and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (OUP 2005). The hardback edition of The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP 2004) was winner of the 2004-5 Leonard Bloomfield Prize,

• 1. Introduction: The Language and its Speakers ; 2. Phonology ; 3. Grammatical Overview ; 4. Predicate Structure - General ; 5. Predicate Structure - Miscellaneous Suffixes ; 6. Predicate Structure - The Tense-Modal System ; 7. Predicate Structure - Secondary Verbs, Mood, and Negation ; 8. Verbal Derivations - Causative and Applicative ; 9. Verbal Reduplication ; 10. Noun Phrase Structure ; 11. Possessed Nouns and Adjectives ; 12. Demonstratives and Related Forms ; 13. Copula Clauses ; 14. Structure of a Verbal Main Clause ; 15. Commands and Questions ; 16. A-Contructions and O-Constructions ; 17. Complement Clauses ; 18. Dependent Clauses ; 19. Nominalised Clauses ; 20. Peripheral Marker jaa and ni-jaa ; 21. Other Peripheral Markers ; 22. The Relational Noun ihi/ehene 'Due to, Because of' ; 23. List Constructions ; 24. Syntactic Organisation ; 25. Word Class Derivations ; 26. Topics in Semantics ; 27. Prehistory

Review from previous edition This is, in many ways, a near-perfect model of how a descriptive grammar of ANY language should be presented. Although the grammatical treatment and exposition are excellent, for me, one of the best parts of the book are the examples and how they are presented.