University of California Press

The Yuki language, including Huchnom and Coast Yuki, was spoken in Mendocino County until relatively recently (the last speaker died in 1983). This grammar is based primarily on spoken narratives recorded by Alfred Kroeber between 1901-1911. While Yuki was extensively documented over the course of the twentieth century, there is relatively little in the way of actual published works on the language. Balodis discusses the language within the historical and cultural context of the people who spoke it. 

In one of the most thorough studies ever prepared of a California language, Hill’s grammar reviews the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse features of Cupeño, a Uto-Aztecan (takic) language of California. Cupeño exhibits many unusual typological features, including split ergativity, that require linguists to revise our understanding of the development of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages in historical and areal perspective.

Wappo is an indigenous language, generally regarded as a language isolate, which was once spoken in the Russian River Valley, just north of San Francisco, California. This reference grammar is based on the speech of Laura Fish Somersal, its last fluent speaker, who died in 1990, and represents the most extensive data and grammatical research ever done on this language. The grammar focuses on morphosyntax, particularly nominal, verbal, and clausal structures and clause combining patterns, from a functional/typological perspective.

This pioneering book is the prototype of the etymological thesaurus that has been the goal of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987. It presents nearly 170 Proto-Tibeto-Burman etymologies in the semantic area of the reproductive system, along with discussions of possible Chinese cognates. Special attention is paid to patterns of semantic associations between the reproductive system and other areas of the lexicon.

The Chimariko language, now extinct, was spoken in Trinity County, California. This reference grammar, based on data collected by Harrington in the 1920s, represents the most comprehensive description of the language. Written from a functional-typological perspective this work also examines language contact in Northern California showing that grammatical traits are often shared among genetically unrelated languages in geographically contiguous areas.

This publication presents the first documentation of Nzadi, a Bantu language spoken by fishermen along the Kasai River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is the product of extensive study by the authors and participants in field methods and group study courses at the University of California, Berkeley, and consists of ten chapters covering the segmental phonology, tone system, morphology, and sentence structure, followed by appendices on the Nzadi people and history and on Proto-Bantu to Nzadi sound changes. Also included are three texts and a lexicon of over 1100 entries, including a number of fish species. Prior to this work, Nzadi had not even been mentioned in the literature, and at this time still has no entry as a language or dialect in the Ethnologue. Of particular interest in the study of Nzadi is its considerable grammatical simplification, resulting in structures quite different from those of canonical Bantu languages. Although Nzadi has lost most of the inherited agglutinative morphology, there are still recognizable class prefixes on nouns and a reflex of noun class agreement in genitive constructions. Other areas of particular interest are human/number agreement, tense-aspect-mood marking, non-subject relative clause constructions, and WH question formation. This succinct, but comprehensive grammar provides broad coverage of the phonological, grammatical and semantic properties that will be of potential interest not only to Bantuists, Africanists and those interested in this area of the DRC, but also to typologists, general linguists, and students of linguistics.

Comprehensive reference grammar of Ingush, a language of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian language family of the central Caucasus (southern Russia). Ingush is notable for its complex phonology, prosody including minimal tone system, complex morphology of both nouns and verbs, clause chaining, long-distance reflexivization, and extreme degree of syntactic ergativity.

This book provides an in-depth look at the production of clicks using a variety of different techniques. Static palatography, linguography, electropalatography, and aerodynamic data, including the intra-oral pressure of the click cavity, never previously before measured, all combine to create a comprehensive picture of click consonants. This important work provides conclusive evidence that click consonants co-articulate, or adjust their articulation, with adjacent consonants in interesting ways.

Although clicks are widely considered to be among the most interesting classes of segments, many aspects of their phonetics are little known. This book examines how the three different click types of IsiZulu differ from each other in their production in both spatial and temporal dimensions, and considers the question of how these complex segments are integrated into the stream of speech. Strong claims have been made in the literature that clicks do not coarticulate, but there is little articulatory evidence to support this claim. Coproduction and coarticulation of the dental, palato-alveolar and lateral clicks of IsiZulu were examined using three different techniques for the collection of physiological phonetic information: staticpalatography and linguography, dynamic palatography, and aerodynamic records. Four native IsiZulu speakers provided controlled data sets of real IsiZulu words.

Results indicate that the characteristics of the front closure release are markedly different for the three click types. Rarefaction in all three click types is achieved by lowering the tongue center, with the greatest proportional change in cavity volume occuring in palato-alveolar clicks and the least with laterals. Palato-alveolar clicks supplement tongue center lowering with some retraction of the location of the dorsal closure. Quite extensive adaptation of both spatial and timing properties of clicks to the different vowel contexts is observed. For example, the dorsal closure is fronted in front vowel contexts, and before mid vowels the tongue center rises in preparation for the upcoming mid-vowel. Clicks are indeed complex articulations but they none-the-less coarticulate. This book contains a wealth of physiological phonetic data, including aerodynamic measures of the click cavity, which have never before been measured, and provides us with a comprehensive account of click consonants.