Guillaume Antoine. A Grammar of Cavineña

Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. — 937 p. — (Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] 44).This book is a comprehensive grammatical description of the endangered Cavineña language (less than 1,200 speakers), spoken in the Amazonian rainforest of Lowland Bolivia, an area where the indigenous languages are virtually unknown. Cavineña belongs to the Tacanan family, comprising five languages, none of which has been the subject of an adequate descriptive grammar.
The book is a thoroughly revised version of my doctoral dissertation (Guillaume 2004). It is based mostly on the extensive fieldwork that I conducted in traditional Cavineña communities between 1996 and 2003. Cast in the functional-typological framework, and based on natural discourse data, the grammar presents a detailed and copiously exemplified account of most aspects of the language, building up from basic levels (phonetic and phonological) to higher levels (morphological and syntactic), and from brief descriptions of each level to a more comprehensive description of the same level in specific chapters.