This grammar provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Yakkha/ a Sino-Tibetan language of the Kiranti branch. Yakkha is spoken by about 14/000 speakers in eastern Nepal/ in the Sankhuwa Sabha and Dhankuta districts. The grammar is based on original fieldwork in the Yakkha community. Its primary source of data is a corpus of 13/000 clauses from narratives and naturally-occurring social interaction which the author recorded and transcribed between 2009 and 2012. Corpus analyses were complemented by targeted elicitation. The grammar is written in a functional-typological framework. It focusses on morphosyntactic and semantic issues/ as these present highly complex and comparatively under-researched fields in Kiranti languages. The sequence of the chapters follows the well-established order of phonological/ morphological/ syntactic and discourse-structural descriptions. These are supplemented by a historical and sociolinguistic introduction as well as an analysis of the complex kinship terminology. Topics such as verbal person marking/ argument structure/ transitivity/ complex predication/ grammatical relations/ clause linkage/ nominalization/ and the topography-based orientation system have received in-depth treatment. Wherever possible/ the structures found were explained in a historical-comparative perspective in order to shed more light on how their particular properties have emerged.
