Review of 'A grammar of Pumi' by Picus Ding

Abstract

The year 2014 saw the completion of two important monographs on Pumi: the book under review (Ding 2014) and Daudey (2014a)’s dissertation, defended at LaTrobe University. These two typologically-informed and corpus-based grammars represent a welcome improvement over previous descriptions of Pumi (Fu 1998 and Lu 2001) which were essentially based on elicited sentences. While the scope of these two grammars is similar, they are by no means redundant, since they describe quite distinct varieties of Northern Pumi, and are based on different text corpora. The book under review is partially based on the author’s PhD dissertation (Ding 1998 – incidentally also defended at LaTrobe University under D. Bradley). It represents however a considerable improvement over Ding’s previous work on several accounts.