Andvik E.E. A Grammar of Tshangla

Leiden, Boston: Brill City, 2010. — 507 p. — ISBN 978-90-04- 1 7827-4.The research upon which this b ook is based, was carried out over a period of eight years, from 1991 until 1999. Work was done in Bhutanese communities in several different locati ons, including eastern Bhutan, Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal, India, the border regions j ust to the s outh of Bhutan in West Bengal and Assam, and even in Kathmandu, Nepal, where there is a community of several scores of Tshangla speakers.
This grammatical description is based on a text corpus of several hundred pages of written texts, transcribed from tape recordings of oral discourse. The texts are of various genres-narrative, hortatory and descriptive - as well as spontaneously produced conversation between two or more speakers. Elicitation has been used to fill in gaps in the text corpus, and to test for paradigmatic oppositions which reveal syntactic and morph ological structure. Finally, participation by the author in everyday situations and in interaction with Tshangla- speaking friends in conversations on various topics has been and continues to be key in understanding the language and the culture which shapes it.