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Index to the Subjects of the Documents and Reports and to the Committees, Senators, and Representatives Presenting Them, with Tables of the Same in Numerical Order

Yukaghir Texts

The book presents authentic texts in two Yukaghir languages, Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir, an isolate group of languages spoken by few small communities in Siberia. The major goal of the book is to make primary Yukaghir data accessible for readers who have no previous knowledge of these languages. Each text is provided with a detailed morph-to-morph translation following thecurrent linguistic standards, as well as with idiomatic English translation. In addition, the book contains Yukaghir-English vocabularies for both Yukaghir languages, with cross-references to all text occurrences of each word, a set of comprehensive morphemic and grammatical indices to text corpora, and abrief overview of basic ethnographic and grammatical facts. The principles of text representation are described in a user's guide. The book will serve as a useful source of data for scholars of the Yukaghir languages and cultures, as well as for anyone interested in cross-linguistic or cross-cultural studies.

Reconstructing Syntax

During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot’s (2002: 625) conclusion: “[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we’ll eat the pudding.” This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax.