Mithun Marianne. The Languages of Native North America

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. — XXI, 773 p.This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer abundant opportunities for expanding our understanding of the shapes that human language can take. Part I provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. Among the topics treated are phonological characteristics such as syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tonal patterns, and sound symbolism; morphological issues such as the nature of polysynthesis, the functions of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, space, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; structural distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; the nature of grammatical relations; and special speech styles such as those used with children, those attributed to men or women, narrative and ceremonial language, speech play, and Plains Sign Talk. Part II catalogues the languages by family, detailing genetic relationships, the locations and numbers of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Included are languages that have arisen in contact situations: pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.