A Carib Grammar and Dictionary (review)

The Carib language, from which the name of the Cariban language family derives, is scattered across discontinuous parts of eastern Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The number of speakers is now probably somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand (p. 2). The four main dialects include Venezuelan Carib, Guyanese Carib, Western Surinamese Carib, and Eastern Surinamese and French Guianese Carib.

The volume under review originated as the author’s Ph.D. dissertation at Leiden University. It comprises the classic descriptive trilogy—a grammatical sketch, this one focused principally at the word level including morphology and morphophonemics; three interlinearized texts, corresponding to three distinct genres; and a cross-dialect dictionary comprising some 6,500 lexemes, about 3,000 of which are new relative to previous works on the Carib language. With its greatly expanded number of lexical items, this grammar and dictionary is an essential acquisition for anyone seriously interested in the Carib language, and it is also an important resource for anyone pursuing historical work on the Cariban family. An excellent introduction briefly addresses sociolinguistic and demographic issues and how the author’s analyses compare with previous linguistic treatments of the various Carib dialects. It also lays out the author’s position on certain controversies in the analysis of Carib and Cariban languages. User-friendly features of the work are a list of grammatical abbreviations (pp. ix–xi) and an appendix of all Carib affixes (pp. 441–48). A second appendix lists nature words for both flora and fauna with scientific names.

The grammar (pp. 21–146) constitutes about 30 percent of the entire work, though it is not a full grammar as that term is commonly understood in descriptive linguistics today. The section on “Sounds” (pp. 21–49) focuses primarily on the inventory of phonemes and syllables, and proposes a unified phonemically-based orthography for writing all dialects; there is a nonpolemical exposition of how the unified orthography compares to each previous proposal. The heart of the grammar (pp. 51–113) deals with parts of speech, including their inflectional and derivational potential. Barely ten pages (pp. 137–46) are devoted to “sentences” or syntax per se, and there is no real treatment of grammatical relations (an issue of high interest for the Cariban family), question constructions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses, etc. A reader who already knows something about syntax across the Cariban family may deduce some likely syntactic patterns from certain full-sentence examples found throughout the discussion of morphology and from the texts, but this is hardly equivalent to explicit treatment of basic syntactic issues. Only quite sparse discussion is provided of some functional domains that are of typological note in at least some other Cariban languages, such as nominalizing and participial forms and tense-aspect-evidentiality.

Courtz’s treatment of parts of speech merits some discussion, as this is the heart of his grammar and Carib parts of speech do raise issues of typological significance. Courtz identifies eight parts of speech, and gives a basic but apparently comprehensive listing of the morphology and morphophonemics associated with each word class. This focus is well motivated within the context of the dictionary portion of the work, as understanding the morphology is essential for being able to look up words (see further below). Courtz’s definitions of parts of speech appear to be first and foremost semantically based (though followed up with brief accounts of major morphosyntactic characteristics): nouns are defined as words that designate “an entity” (p. 55); adjectives as those that designate “a quality,” which qualify an entity (p. 71), or which “indicate a property” (p. 142); verbs as those that designate “a process, i.e. some kind of participation in real or imaginary time” (curiously, there is no discussion about whether stative verbs might exist) (p. 73); postpositions designate “a relation” (p. 97).

A semantics-first approach to parts of speech is, I believe, quite problematic in any language family, and if applied seriously would obscure typologically significant facts about Cariban languages. For instance, Carib has...