Kannada, one of the major languages of the Dravidian family, is spoken by over 40 million people, mainly in the state of Karnataka, South India, where it is the official language. It is one of the twenty-two languages recognized by the Indian Constitution. It has a rich literary tradition going back to the ninth century, and exhibits a complex pattern of socio- linguistic and stylistic variation, marked, in part, by a thorough assimi- lation of Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi-Urdu, etc.) and, more recently, English elements. The present descriptive grammar gives a detailed and sophisticated account of the standard language, drawing on the insights of traditional, structuralist, and generative linguists, and on the author’s own ex- tensive research. Keeping the needs of both the theoretician and the descriptivist in mind, the work gives a lucid, explicit, and in many cases original account of the major and minor structures of the language in syntax, morphology, and phonology. A valuable feature of this grammar is the author’s consistent attempt to relate formal and functional aspects of the language. Although the variety described is the standard literary variety (because of its greater morphological transparency), the forms of the colloquial varieties are continuously referred to, and the examples convey the flavour of spoken, idiomatic Kannada. With its descriptive rigour, range of phenomena covered, wealth of examples, and ethno- graphic insights, this volume is the most current, comprehensive, and authoritative description of modern Kannada to date. The book will interest students and researchers in the areas of linguistic theory, descriptive linguistics, language typology, compara- tive/contrastive linguistics, language contact and convergence, and South Asian linguistics as well as translation and Kannada language and literary studies.
