This is the first grammar in English of Khatso, an endangered language spoken in a single farming village in China by descendants of Kublai Khan’s Mongol soldiers. Based on natural language from dozens of speakers, this analysis captures the way Khatso is spoken in daily life. As a result, it is the most comprehensive description of Khatso yet, providing an in-depth look at the features, structures and systems that comprise this unique language.

Khatso (kha55tso31 [special characters omitted]; also Katso, Kazhuo [special characters omitted], Gazhuo [special characters omitted] and Yunnan Mongolian; ISO 639-3:kaf) is an endangered Ngwi (or Yi) language spoken in Xingmeng, a single farming village in Yunnan, China. Khatso speakers, who number about 5600 people, are descendants of the Mongolian soldiers Kublai Khan brought to Yunnan in the 13th century, and they still identify as Mongolian today. The language has evolved considerably through language contact, however, and is now considered part of the central branch of the Ngwi language family within the Tibeto-Burman phylum.

This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.

First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.

Creek (or Muskogee) is a Muskogean language spoken by several thousand members of the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations of Oklahoma and by several hundred members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This volume is the first modern grammar of Creek, compiled by a leading authority on the languages of the southern United States. ø Intended for scholars, students, and Creek instructors, this reference grammar describes all the major morphological and syntactic patterns in the language. Special attention is given to pitch accent and tone, active agreement, locative prefixes, tense, aspect, and switch reference. The description covers several hundred years of documentation and draws heavily on materials written by Creek speakers. It is likely to be the definitive source on the language for years to come.

This is a comprehensive grammar of the Hills Karbi variety spoken predominantly in the Karbi Anglong districts. Karbi belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) family but its exact phylogenetic status has remained unclear. By providing a diachronically-oriented functional analysis of all structural levels of Karbi, this grammar offers a reference work that provides a thorough account of this language. The data in this grammar come from fieldwork that was primarily carried out in the district capital of Diphu although the corpus includes recordings of speakers from all over the two Karbi Anglong districts. This corpus is freely available both as fully glossed text in Himalayan Linguistics (Konnerth and Tisso 2018) and as original media files in ELAR (SOAS University of London). Now also including a glossary, this grammar is a thoroughly revised version of the 2014 dissertation of the author, which won the 2015 Pāṇini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT). In this revised version, a few new sections have been added and numerous other sections have been thoroughly updated.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. Seino van Breugel provides a deep and thorough coverage and analysis of all major areas of the grammar, which makes this book of great interest and value to general linguists and typologists as well as area specialists. Alongside an Atong-English dictionary and five fully-glossed Atong texts recorded during extensive fieldwork, this work also provides a sizable ethnolinguistic introduction to the speakers and their culture. Of particular interest is the pragmatic approach taken for the grammatical analysis. Whereas the form of an utterance provides some clue as to its possible meaning, inference is always needed to arrive at the most relevant interpretation within the context in which the utterance occurs. "This is a very important book for South Asian and Sino-Tibetan linguistic scholarship. Of the 200 languages of Northeast India, only a handful have been documented; the present work brings the number of full-scale modern grammars for these languages to six. Thus it represents a unique and extremely valuable contribution." Professor Scott DeLancey University of Oregon "This is a solid academic work which makes a huge contribution to the field. There is no other detailed account of this particular language, and it is highly doubtful that anyone will write something more comprehensive in the future." Dr Willem de Reuse University of North Texas