A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 2: Semantics, Syntax, Discourse

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.

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.