Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Newar is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal but also outside that area. The variety of Newar spoken in the village of Dolakha, referred to as Dolakha Newar or Dolokhae, is mutually unintelligible with the Kathmandu varieties. This book is the result of twenty years of work and that shows in the amazing depth of analysis and typological insight.

Carol Genetti’s introduction discusses the position of Newar within the Tibeto-Burman language family, its dialects and history, and its position as a national language vis a vis Nepali, the official language. Despite its changed status, there are many concerns about the viability of Newar in an increasingly global culture (12).

Dolakhae is verb-final (with an unmarked subject-object-verb order), with postpositions, ergative/absolutive case marking, and an intriguing system of embedding. The terminology used is as theory-neutral as possible (26) even if the framework is functional-typological. The data were gathered mainly from five trilingual (English, Dolakha Newar, and Nepali) speakers and through recorded narratives, conversations, and songs.

Chs. 2 and 3 cover the segmental phonetics, phonology, and prosody of Dolakhae. Chs. 4 and 5 analyze nouns and pronouns. Nouns are marked by clitics for number, case, and individuation/extension. Case is marked primarily through ergative and dative case on nominal heads (absolutive being unmarked) and NP-internally through genitive and allative. G argues in detail and convincingly that the plural is in between an affix and clitic (97), and that case is between clitic and postposition (103). Extension and individuation are marked either through clitics (as in the case of nouns) or through particles. This is discussed more extensively in Ch. 10.

Chs. 6 through 9 describe verbs, adjectivals, quantifiers, and adverbials. Ch. 11 is a short chapter on the structure of the NP and Ch. 12 on clause types. Here, copular, verbless, intransitives, dative-experiencers, transitive clauses, and ditransitive clauses are discussed. Chs. 13 and 14 cover grammatical relations and word order. Causatives (using a suffix -ker), non-declaratives (e.g. the sentence-final interrogative -ra), reflexives, negation (using a verbal affix -ma), and comparison are discussed in Ch. 15. Tense and aspect are reviewed in Ch. 16.

Data on embedding are provided in Chs. 17 through 21. Nominalizations, typical of Tibeto-Burman, create dependent clauses to become nominal modifiers and complements. Verbal complements are sometimes used in non-embedded constructions, possibly to mark focus (401). There is a limited use of infinitives. However, the ‘most important [is the] participial construction’ (428), more correctly labeled as converb. G claims that there are no constraints on this construction apart from ordering, and considers the lack of constraints on e.g. the scopes of negation, anaphora, and control to be noteworthy (446). The appendices provide lists of affixes, words, and a glossed text.

In conclusion, this is a very rich grammar, helpful and accessible to a wide range of readers, full of examples with very useful glosses.