Reference Grammar of Warao

Warao is a language isolate of Venezuela. The approximately 15,000 Warao currently live in the swampy areas next to the hundreds of caños through which the Orinoco river flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the Warao are bilingual in Warao and Spanish to varying degrees. Many Warao monolinguals are still found in the easternmost areas of the Orinoco Delta.

A Reference Grammar of Warao is the result of 20 years of research on that language basing on various field work sessions. The goals of the research are twofold: to present a typologically-oriented reference grammar of the language, and to describe, on the grounds of sociolinguistic data, the speech styles observed in Warao. The study contains the following sections:

Section I: Generalities, Section II: Syntax (with chapters on the Order of constituents in the basic simplex sentence, Verbal sentences, Copulative sentences, Stative sentences, Complex structures, Questions, Negation, Direct speech, Reflexives/reciprocals, Focus,Ellipsis, Anaphora, Relatives), Section III: Morphology (Nouns, Determiners, Numerals, Pronouns, Adverbials, Postpositions, Verbs and the verb phrase), Section IV: Phonology, Section V: Style. A Reference Grammar of Warao is also an attempt to widen the scope of information about the still little known languages of the Amazon-Orinoco basin in lowland South America.