A grammar of Western Tamang

Viac o knihe

This grammar examines major communicative coding devices in Western Tamang and compares them with those in Eastern Tamang from a typological perspective. Western Tamang employs thirty-five basic consonants and eleven vowels, including four phonetic pitches of tone, to code 'words' at the conceptual lexicon. It utilizes morphology, intonation, and word order as primary grammar-coding devices to encode atomic propositional information, while other grammatical sub-systems mainly code discourse-pragmatics. As a complex tonal language, Western Tamang features a somewhat consistent ergative case-marking system, with human patients marked by a dative case suffix. All case-role and tense-aspect and modality markers, except for negation, are cliticized as suffixes. The order of clausal constituents may vary primarily for pragmatic effects. Western Tamang lacks agreement and employs nominalization extensively for various syntactic functions. Relative clauses are formed with nominalized verbs followed by a genitive suffix. Notably, it exhibits non-promotional passive constructions and uses conjunction and subordination to maintain coherence across clauses. The co-authors, Dr. Dan Raj Regmi and Dr. Ambika Regmi, are affiliated with the Central Department of Linguistics at Tribhuvan University, Nepal.