The Grammar of Knowledge

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Her other major publications, with OUP, include Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000), Language Contact in Amazonia(2002), Evidentiality (2004), The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, (2008), Imperatives and Commands (2010), Languages of the Amazon (2012), and The Art of Grammar (forthcoming).R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), in addition to A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford University Press, 2004;, paperback 2011) and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is also the author of the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (Oxford University Press, 2010-12) and of an academic autobiography I am a linguist (Brill, 2011).

This outstanding collection of studies probes into one of the most critical areas of human cognition: knowledge. The systematic survey of 12 languages whose grammatical system includes epistemological devices reveals both fascinating differences and striking similarities in how different languages construe the nature of knowledge and its sources.

• 1. The grammar of knowledge: a cross-linguistic view of evidentials and the expression of information source ; 2. The grammar of knowledge in Hinuq ; 3. Expression of knowledge in Tatar ; 4. The grammar of knowledge in Saaroa ; 5. The grammar of knowledge in Kurtop: evidentiality, mirativity, and expectation of knowledge ; 6. Evidentiality in Ersu ; 7. Evidentiality in Kalmyk ; 8. The non-visible marker in Dyirbal ; 9. The grammar of knowledge in Maaka (Western Chadic, Nigeria) ; 10. Expression of information-source meanings in Asheninca Perene ; 11. Nominalization, knowledge, and information source in Aguarana ; 12. The grammar of knowledge in Tima ; 13. Saying, seeing, and knowing among the Karawari of Papua New Guinea