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A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 2 is part of a comprehensive two-volume text that linguistically renders a written record of the endangered Upper Tanana language. Serving as a descriptive grammar of the Upper Tanana language, volume 2 meticulously details a language that is currently spoken, with fluency, by approximately fifty people in limited parts of Alaska’s eastern interior and Canada’s Yukon Territory. As part of the Dene (Athabascan) language group, Upper Tanana embodies elements of both the Alaskan and Canadian subgroups of Northern Dene. This is the first comprehensive grammatical description of any of the Alaskan Dene languages.
The grammar is written in the framework of basic linguistic theory in order to make it accessible to a wide variety of readers, including specialists in Dene languages, linguists interested in the structure of non-Indo-European languages, and teachers and learners of Upper Tanana and related languages.
List of contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of Abbreviations
Preface to volume 2
Acknowledgments
- Introduction to volume 2
I Semantics
- Semantic properties of nouns
- Noun classification
- Lexical semantics
- Tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality
- Lexical aspect: verb theme categories
- Inflectional aspect
- The modal system (inflection)
- Modal particles
II The simple clause
- Word order overview
- Word order in simple clauses
- Nonverbal predicates
- Polar Questions
- Content questions
- Requests
- Negation
- Third-person marking
- Pronominal number marking
- The noun phrase
- Non-clausal coordination
- Quantification of entities
- Comparison
- Prosodic augmentation
III Beyond the clause
- Coordination of clauses
- Relative clauses
- Adverbial clauses
27 Verbs with clausal complements
- Quotative frames
- Addressing individuals
- Managing information structure
- Insubordination
Appendix I: Portmanteau morphemes in the conjunct zone
Glossed sample texts
Bibliography
About the author
Olga Lovick is a professor and head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of
A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 1: Phonology, Lexical Classes, Morphology (Nebraska, 2020), editor of a collection of stories of the Tetlin people of Alaska, and coeditor of a collection of stories by women from Northway, Alaska.
Summary
A Grammar of Upper Tanana is a comprehensive text that performs the impressive task of linguistically rendering a written record of the endangered Upper Tanana language.
