A grammar of Palula
Henrik Liljegren
Copyright Year:
ISBN 13: 9783946234319
Publisher: Language Science Press
Language: English
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Attribution
CC BY
Reviews
This body of work is very comprehensive for the intended scope. The text provides an overview of historical, geographical, cultural and linguistic context prior to delving into standard linguistic elements. This enables the reader to have... read more
This body of work is very comprehensive for the intended scope. The text provides an overview of historical, geographical, cultural and linguistic context prior to delving into standard linguistic elements. This enables the reader to have precursory knowledge of the inhabitants of the region, the culture and respective language.
This study is both etic and emic in nature, hence it appears to be very accurate. The information is observed in the field and is in alignment with or building upon findings of previous studies/scholars.
The book is well organized and relevant, and changes, if any, should be easy to implement.
Scholar demonstrates a full understanding of all the linguistics nuisances by having been immersed in the culture of the region and native language and that has allowed him to include narration which brings authenticity to the text as well as enhance the scholastic content in a genuine and clear manner.
The text appears to follow the same framework with equal attention to both depth and breadth in all the sections.
The text contains very clear headings and sub-headings and can be allocated or divided by subject as needed to design/designate modules.
The text seems to follow a logical order as it examines the very basic building blocks of the language and later expounds upon more complex linguistic elements. The text covers the entire scope of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
There does not appear to be any issues with accessing any of the information contained within the book.
The text appears to be free from any grammatical errors.
This text is conceived in complete immersion in the culture of Palula community, and it demonstrations an appreciation for the culture and language of its origin as well as the surrounding geo-cultural region.
This book is a culmination of years of dedication to the study of a language which is nearly endangered. The author/scholar is from an entirely different culture and background, as such he first had to become fluent in the language-a vast departure from European family of languages - to be able to analyze and synthesize the findings rooted in Indo-Aryan family of languages. This text preserves a unique language and culture.
The only suggestion would be that the book could potentially contain graphs and tables to illustrate some of the more complex material.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Typological overview
- Chapter 3: Phonology
- Chapter 4: Parts of speech and the lexical profile
- Chapter 5: Nouns
- Chapter 6: Pronouns
- Chapter 7: Adjectives and quantifiers
- Chapter 8: Adverbs and postpositions
- Chapter 9: Verbs
- Chapter 10: Verbal categories
- Chapter 11: Noun phrases and non-verbal agreement
- Chapter 12: Grammatical relations
- Chapter 13: Simple clauses and argument structure
- Chapter 14: Complex constructions
- Chapter 15: Sentence modification
Ancillary Material
Submit ancillary resourceAbout the Book
This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.
About the Contributors
Author
Henrik Liljegren is a researcher in linguistics at Stockholm University, where he received his PhD in 2008. He is one of the co-founders of Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI), a resource centre for the many language communities in Pakistan’s mountainous North, where he served for several years while also conducting fieldwork in the country. His main research interests are areal-linguistic typology, language contact, Indo-Iranian languages, case alignment, phonology and lexicography. Apart from research per se, Henrik Liljegren has been engaged in language maintenance efforts and orthography development, mentoring language activists in local communities to collect and organize data, and in building networks between local communities and organizations. He is presently leading a Swedish Research Council project, investigating language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush-Karakoram region.