A Grammar of Gidar

This reference grammar of Gidar, spoken in the Northern Province of Cameroon by some 40.000 people, contains hypotheses on the forms and functions of its linguistic structures and supporting argumentation and evidence. The language belongs to the Central Branch of Chadic languages, but its phonology, morphology, and syntax differ significantly from those of related Chadic languages and include rare or hitherto unobserved phenomena. Gidar has fronting and rounding long distance vowel assimilations that operate to the left and the right of the triggering vowel. Some prepositional phrases are incorporated within the verbal piece framed by aspectual markers. There are two tense and aspectual systems. The focus on the verb requires the formation of a special phrase whose head is an infinitive form of the verb with its object.

Autorentext

The Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Humboldt Research Award winner and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, is the author of descriptive grammars and dictionaries of languages belonging to three branches of Chadic. He has published numerous comparative and cross-linguistic theoretical studies and has done fieldwork in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The author has held visiting appointments at Bayero College in Kano (Nigeria), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, CNRS, Nice, the University of Nice, and LaTrobe University (Australia).

Inhalt
Contents: Gidar reference grammar Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Vowel harmony.