Download or read book Siouan Languages and Linguistics written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert L. Rankin was a seminal figure in late 20th and early 21st centuries in the field of Siouan linguistics. His knowledge, like the papers he produced, was voluminous. We have gathered here a representation of his work that spans over thirty years. The papers presented here focus on both the languages Rankin studied in depth (Quapaw, Kansa, Biloxi, Ofo, and Tutelo) and comparative historical work on the Siouan language family in general. While many of the papers included have been previously published, one third of them have never before been made public including a grammatical sketch and dictionary of Ofo and his final paper on the place of Mandan in the larger Siouan family.

Download or read book The Languages of Native North America written by Marianne Mithun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-07 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Download or read book Mid America Linguistics Conference written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America written by Carmen Dagostino and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 998 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

Download or read book Romance Linguistics written by Armin Schwegler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains selected papers from the 27th International Symposium on Romance Lanuages (LSRL XXVII), held in Irvine in February 1997. Focusing on theoretical perspectives, it covers expletive auxilliaries, negation and independent morphological development, and enclitic "-n" in Spanish.

Download or read book A Grammar of Creek Muskogee written by Jack B. Martin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creek (or Muskogee) is a Muskogean language spoken by several thousand members of the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations of Oklahoma and by several hundred members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This volume is the first modern grammar of Creek, compiled by a leading authority on the languages of the southern United States. ø Intended for scholars, students, and Creek instructors, this reference grammar describes all the major morphological and syntactic patterns in the language. Special attention is given to pitch accent and tone, active agreement, locative prefixes, tense, aspect, and switch reference. The description covers several hundred years of documentation and draws heavily on materials written by Creek speakers. It is likely to be the definitive source on the language for years to come.

Download or read book The Rise of Agreement written by Eric Fuss and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace 'worn-out', underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

Download or read book Barayin Morphosyntax written by Joseph Lovestrand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) analysis of the morphosyntax of Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 6000 people in the Guera region of Chad. The core chapters of the book draw on rich empirical data to provide analyses of the basic clause, noun phrases, verb phrases, and serial verb constructions. The version of LFG adopted here includes two recent innovations: the first is minimal c-structure, which results in simpler phrase structure representations; the second is the assumption that glue semantics accounts for argument selection, rejecting the need for a level of a-structure or for Completeness and Coherence in f-structure. Argument sharing in serial verb constructions can thus be modeled in a connected s-structure. This method of modeling semantic composition in complex predicates is extended to directional and associated motion complex predicates in Choctaw and Wambaya, removing the need to appeal to a special mechanism to unite semantic forms in such constructions.

Download or read book World Englishes Volumes I III Set written by Tometro Hopkins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Englishes is a twelve-volume series, presenting a comprehensive, detailed survey of English as it is spoken all over the world. The volumes are organised into four groups, covering Britain, Europe, America, Africa and Asia, and celebrate English in all its diversity. The chapters contain maps, facts and figures, and a detailed description about English as it is spoken in each region and are an invaluable library resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and academics interested in the diversity of the English language.

Download or read book Cherokee Reference Grammar written by Brad Montgomery-Anderson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cherokees have the oldest and best-known Native American writing system in the United States. Invented by Sequoyah and made public in 1821, it was rapidly adopted, leading to nineteenth-century Cherokee literacy rates as high as 90 percent. This writing system, the Cherokee syllabary, is fully explained and used throughout this volume, the first and only complete published grammar of the Cherokee language. Although the Cherokee Reference Grammar focuses on the dialect spoken by the Cherokees in Oklahoma—the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians—it provides the grammatical foundation upon which all the dialects are based. In his introduction, author Brad Montgomery-Anderson offers a brief account of Cherokee history and language revitalization initiatives, as well as instructions for using this grammar. The book then delves into an explanation of Cherokee pronunciation, orthography, parts of speech, and syntax. While the book is intended as a reference grammar for experienced scholars, Montgomery-Anderson presents the information in accessible stages, moving from easier examples to more complex linguistic structures. Examples are taken from a variety of sources, including many from the Cherokee Phoenix. Audio clips of various text examples throughout can be found on the accompanying CDs. The volume also includes three appendices: a glossary keyed to the text; a typescript for the audio component; and a collection of literary texts: two traditional stories and a historical account of a search party traveling up the Arkansas River. The Cherokee Nation, as the second-largest tribe in the United States and the largest in Oklahoma, along with the United Keetoowah Band and the Eastern band of Cherokees, have a large number of people who speak their native language. Like other tribes, they have seen a sharp decline in the number of native speakers, particularly among the young, but they have responded with ambitious programs for preserving and revitalizing Cherokee culture and language. Cherokee Reference Grammar will serve as a vital resource in advancing these efforts to understand Cherokee history, language, and culture on their own terms.

Download or read book Ghanaian Pidgin English in Its West African Context written by Magnus Huber and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first published full-scale study of the Ghanaian variety of West African Pidgin English (GhaPE) makes extensive use of hitherto neglected historical material and provides a synchronic account of GhaPE's structure and sociolinguistics. Special focus is on the differences between GhaPE and other West African Pidgins, in particular the development of, and interrelations between, the different varieties of restructured English in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. This monograph further includes an overview of the history of Afro-European contact languages in Lower Guinea with special emphasis on the Gold Coast; an outline of the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with a description of how and when the transplantation of Sierra Leonean Krio to other West African countries took place; an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the origin, development, and spread of restructured Englishes on the Lower Guinea Coast; an account of the different varieties of GhaPE and their sociolinguistic status in the contemporary linguistic ecology of Ghana; as well as a comprehensive structural description of the “uneducated” variety of GhaPE. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains illustrative material such as spoken GhaPE and photographs.

Download or read book Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Non Transformational Syntax written by Robert Borsley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative introduction explores the four main non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, and Simpler Syntax. It also considers a range of issues that arise in connection with these approaches, including questions about processing and acquisition. An authoritative introduction to the main alternatives to transformational grammar Includes introductions to three long-established non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Categorial Grammar, along with the recently developed Simpler Syntax Brings together linguists who have developed and shaped these theories to illustrate the central properties of these frameworks and how they handle some of the main phenomena of syntax Discusses a range of issues that arise in connection with non-transformational approaches, including processing and acquisition

Download or read book The Indo Aryan Languages written by Danesh Jain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 1039 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

Download or read book Ergativity written by Alana Johns and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-02-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overarching theme of this volume is the formal expression of the range and limits of ergativity. The book contains cutting-edge theoretical papers by top authors in the field, who also conduct original field work and bring new data to light. It contains articles that apply the most recent theoretical tools to the area of ergativity, and then explore the issues that emerge. Languages investigated in the text include Basque, Georgian, and Hindi.

Download or read book Verbal Agreement and the Grammar behind its Breakdown written by Elly van Gelderen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about what the 'lack' of agreement indicates about the structure of language. Rather than assuming that mistakes occur in languages, disagreement can be seen as an indication of a certain structural relationship. In a Minimalist framework, the partial agreement or complete lack of agreement is determined by when checking of case and agreement takes place and with what nominal element. Earlier work has shown that there may be variation regarding the number of functional categories a language activates. If that account is correct, languages with fewer functional categories (Dutch and Old English) will also have fewer specifiers and therefore less Spec-Head agreement. In these cases, government will play a role in the checking of case and agreement. There are, however, other reasons for the 'breakdown'. For instance, expletives play a major role and they may only be specified for some features (number or person) and when they agree with the verb, the 'real' subject does not. Two additional reasons are discussed: the impact from grammaticalization and from asymmetrical (e.g. coordinate) structures. The focus is on Modern, Old and Middle English and Dutch, but other Germanic languages (German, Swedish, Yiddish), Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Spanish), Arabic, Chamorro, Hebrew, Hopi, Kirundi, O'odham, Navajo, and Urdu/Hindi are discussed as well.

Download or read book Caddo Verb Morphology written by Lynette R. Melnar and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the time of European contact with Native communities, the Caddos (who call themselves the Hasinai) were accomplished traders living in the southern plains. Their communities occupied parts of present-day Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. It was early Spanish explorers who named a part of this territory ?Texas,? borrowing the Caddo word for ?friend.? Today there are approximately thirty-five hundred Caddos, most of whom live in Oklahoma. Their original language, which is related to the Plains languages?Pawnee, Arikara, Kitsai, and Wichita?is rapidly dying and is spoken only by a diminishing number of Caddo elders. Drawing on interviews with Caddo speakers, tapes made by earlier researchers, and written accounts, Lynette R. Melnar provides the first full-length overview and analysis of Caddo grammar. Because Caddo is an extremely complex language, Melnar?s clear description will be important to linguists in general as well as to those specializing in Native languages. Caddo Verb Morphology is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Caddos? traditional world in particular and of Native America in general.