A grammar of Kham (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A grammar of Kham by David E. Watters Edward Garrett A grammar of Kham. By David E. Watters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 477. ISBN 0521812453. $150 (Hb). Kham, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodic branch spoken by forty to fifty thousand people in the upper valleys of mid-western Nepal, now has its first comprehensive grammar. A revision of Watters’s 1998 University of Oregon Ph.D. dissertation, this book has been in the making since 1969, when W inaugurated his lifelong commitment to the language. After a brief introduction to the people and their language, W then describes a tonal language characterized by pronominalizing morphology, elaborate causativization and detransitivization morphology, person-based split-ergativity, clause-chaining, evidentiality, and extensive use of nominalization. The book ends with over twenty pages of texts followed by a basic 400-plus word vocabulary highlighted by W’s tentative Himalayish reconstructions. Phonologists will be particularly interested in the chapter on tone, which describes a contrastive fourtone system arising from the intersection of tonal melody and modal/lax voice register. The existence of complex rules of tonal assimilation and dissimilation forced the creation of a practical reading orthography that marks voice register but not tonal melody. Most of the Kham examples in the book follow this orthography, which may be a good thing, since W’s phonetic transcriptions simultaneously mark both the underlying tone and the surface tone of a morpheme. The chapter on adverbs and adverbials includes a lengthy section on expressive adverbs, modifiers that typically occur in reduplicative couplets immediately preceding a verb. In most such reduplications, base vowels are copied as a or ya. There are two notable exceptions to this rule: if a or ya occurs anywhere in the base, other base vowels remain unchanged in the copy; and, onomatopoeic bases tend to remain unaffected by reduplication. In addition to fully discussing the phonology of reduplication in Kham, W also treats the widespread use of reduplication in light verb constructions to derive conative interpretations. Kham’s evidential system, modest compared to that of some Tibeto-Burman languages, will still interest researchers. It includes a mirative construction, which as in Tibetan languages, exploits an auxiliary use of the existential copular verb ‘to be’ to mark unanticipated new information, and a reportative particle used for information the speaker attributes to another source and for which s/he disclaims responsibility. As in other Tibeto-Burman languages, nominalization plays an important role in Kham syntax. It is used to mark relative clauses, clausal arguments in complement clauses, and even independent verbs in main clause constructions. W’s book is unique in devoting an entire chapter to the specific discourse conditions under which the third usage is possible. He makes the novel claim that nominalizations are used as independent clauses to mark narrative discontinuity in the form of backgrounded, unpredictable, or surprising material. These are just a few of the highlights of the book, which is an extraordinary achievement reflecting W’s profound knowledge of Kham. Tibeto-Burmanists and typologists will profit from this book for years to come, but others should take note, too: this is how to write a grammar. [End Page 477] Edward Garrett Eastern Michigan University Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America