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The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the verbal system of Bodo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India, particularly Assam. The description is primarily based on a 1.2-million-word Bodo corpus, both written and spoken, involving different genres.
This is the first extensive work solely devoted to the description of the Bodo verb. The book provides a thorough description of the Bodo verb that will be comprehensive enough to be of use to Tibeto-Burmanists, on the one hand, and to language typologists, on the other. Second, it addresses certain pedagogic issues relating to the teaching of the Bodo language in schools.
The book encompasses a description of verbal roots, formation of verbal stems, inflection of verbal stems, and distribution of various verb forms in different types of clauses, such as independent clauses, embedded clauses, and chained clauses. Finally, a pedagogic perspective is provided with reference to the morphosyntactic aspects of the Bodo verb.
This book was the winner of the 2016 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Linguistics.
List of contents
CONTENTS: Language and People - Literature Review - The Verb Root - The Verb Stem - Verbal Inflections - Complex Verbal Constructions - Clausal Constructions - Pedagogy and the Bodo Verb - Concluding Statement.
About the author
Prafulla Basumatary is a linguist who was awarded his PhD in 2015 from Gauhati University, Assam, India. He won the University Grants Commission ¿ Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship Award for his doctoral research during 2008¿2013. He has carried out extensive fieldwork for the documentation and archiving of Bodo, of which he is a native speaker. Currently he is a guest faculty member in the Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University, with specializations in multilingual education, linguistic field methods, and training in linguistic software.
Report
«Basumatary's detailed analysis and exposition of the verbal system of Bodo is a milestone in Tibeto-Burman linguistics. We have no comparable study for any Tibeto-Burman language of India. This is a major contribution to comparative Tibeto-Burman and should serve as a model for scholars describing other languages.» - Scott DeLancey, Professor of Linguistics, University of Oregon
