On Reconstructing Grammar : Comparative Cariban Morphosyntax

orig.boards Minor rubbing. VG. 24x15cm, xv,284 pp., Series: Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, 18. "This text has two goals: first to argue that grammaticalization theory has advanced to the point that it can be used with the comparative method to reconstruct the grammar of Proto-Languages; and second to give a detailed case study of this methodology in examining the typologically interesting Cariban language family in South America - a group of languages which linguists claim have a technically impossible syntactic structure. His conclusions answer long-standing questions about the historical reconstruction of grammar and will interest linguists working on South American languages as well as on grammaticalization, and linguists working in the descriptive or functional traditions" - Publisher's description.