Desano Grammar (review)

This grammar of a Tukanoan language is the result of work among the Desanos of eastern Columbia principally during 1963–1984. The author indicates that the work was influenced by an unpublished 1992 Field manual for descriptive linguistics by Thomas Payne. Brief overviews of constituent order typology and phonology are followed by chapters on parts of speech, the noun phrase, case, the verb phrase, valence changing operations, sentence structure, question formation, negation, subordination, and pragmatic considerations.

The description shows Desano to be an accusative SOV language with a rich agglutinative morphology. Noun morphology is sensitive to animacy distinctions. Specific direct objects and experiencers receive the same case marker and locational terms another, leaving the rest of the nominal constituents unmarked. There is a large set of noun classifiers (but too little said about how they work). The set of true adjectives is very small; in the majority of cases deverbalizations of stative verbs handle the need to form descriptive expressions. The verb carries agreement markers for person, number, gender, and animacy of the subject and markers for such categories as tense and evidentiality; it allows for a great deal of compounding and for incorporation of both subject and object nouns. Among the valence changing mechanisms are three different types of causative formations, a morphological benefactive, and a passive. Desano appears to make extensive use of what is variously known as external possession or possessor ascension. Different kinds of subordination are handled by nominalization. Finally, it may be mentioned that Desano has canonical switch reference.

The presentation emphasizes typological considerations more than language-specific ones and seems to give an equal weight to morphology and syntax. Nevertheless, the book actually reads as a morphology-in-disguise with discussions and illustrations of each morpheme placed under whatever premeditated chapter heading was available. Given this emphasis, a brief overview of the total morphological layout and/or an index of grammatical morphemes would have been useful, as would other deviations from the generic format that might allow for more in-depth treatments of phenomena of particular prominence in the language. It is lamentable that the author chose to only mark stress ‘where it is needed to distinguish meaning’ (9), that is where, to the author’s knowledge, the form enters into some minimal pair with respect to stress, and to always cite words with the morphemes in what the author considers to be their underlying form ‘[f]or easier reading of examples’ (9). The first decision means needlessly throwing away important information, and the latter decision could only be justified if there were an exhaustive treatment of morphophonemics, which is not the case. It is hoped that these shortcomings will be remedied in Marion Miller’s forthcoming Desano dictionary. For readers who are interested in the ideological underpinnings of linguistic examples, the book offers translation sentences such as: ‘We should tell our children God’s Word’ (90), where ‘we’ is marked for the inclusive.