A Grammar of Basque

As the only surviving pre-Indo-European language of western Europe, Basque has often attracted the interest of linguists. Whereas, traditionally, descriptive work on Basque has primarily focused on morphological features, including its complex system of verb-argument agreement and its strict ergative pattern of inflection, during the last two decades a new generation of Basque linguists has produced very sophisticated, theoretically-informed work on many aspects of the syntax, morphology and phonology of the language, revealing, for instance, a process of focalization with many interesting properties and the existence in some dialects of an accentual system strikingly similar to that of standard Japanese. The book, bringing together this accumulated knowledge on the structure of Basque, is considerably more complete than any other existing grammar of the language. Another interesting feature of this grammar is that the description is illustrated with fully-glossed examples extracted from a great number of written sources. Although the focus is the modern standard language, dialectal features are considered in detail and examples are taken from all dialects and periods.

Auteur

Jose Ignacio Hualde is Professor at the University of Illinois, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

Jon Ortiz de Urbina is Professor at the University of Deusto, Spain.

Résumé

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.