A Grammar of Nganasan

Book excerpt: With this descriptive grammar of Nganasan Beáta Wagner-Nagy presents a comprehensive description of the highly endangered Samoyedic language, spoken only by a small number of individuals on Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula. Based on corpus data from the Nganasan Spoken Language Corpus as well as field work the grammar follows a traditional structure. Contents range from a description of phonetic features and phonological processes over word classes, morphological features to syntactic and semantic properties. The grammar highlights morphophonological alternations as well as the pragmatic organization of Nganasan. A discussion of the core vocabulary completes the account in addition to two sample texts. The grammar reflects significant typological aspects thus serving as a reasonable basis for further comparison in Uralic studies.