Download or read book Tense and Aspect in Bantu written by Derek Nurse and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-07-03 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derek Nurse looks at variations in the form and function of tense and aspect in Bantu, a branch of Niger-Congo, the world's largest language phylum. Bantu languages are spoken in central, eastern, and southern sub-Saharan Africa south of a line between Nigeria and Somalia. By current estimates there are between 250 and 600 of them, as yet neither adequately classified nor fully described. Professor Nurse's account is based on data from more than 200 Bantu languages and varieties, a representative sample of which is freely available on the publisher's website. He devotes substantial chapters to the analysis and comparison of the different tense and aspect systems found in Bantu. He also examines the verbal categories with which they interact, including negation and focus. Synchronic and diachronic perspectives are interwoven throughout the book. Following a brief history of Bantu over the last five thousand years, the final two chapters look systematically at the history of tense and aspect in Bantu. The first deals with the reconstruction of the earlier forms from which contemporary structures, morphemes, and categories are derived, and the second with the processes of change, including grammaticalization, by means of which older analytical structures and independent lexical items moved as they became incorporated as grammatical inflections and categories.
Download or read book A Grammar of Kham written by David E. Watters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
Download or read book Mungaka Bali Dictionary written by Johannes Stöckle and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A grammar of Gyeli written by Nadine Grimm and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This grammar offers a grammatical description of the Ngòló variety of Gyeli, an endangered Bantu (A80) language spoken by 4,000-5,000 "Pygmy" hunter-gatherers in southern Cameroon. It represents one of the most comprehensive descriptions of a northwestern Bantu language. The grammatical description, which is couched in a form-to-function approach, covers all levels of language, ranging from Gyeli phonology to its information structure and complex clauses. It draws on nineteen months of fieldwork carried out as part of the "Bagyeli/Bakola" DoBeS (Documentation of Endangered Languages) project between 2010 and 2014. The resulting multimodal corpus from that project, which includes texts of diverse genres such as traditional stories, narratives, multi-party conversations and dialogues, procedural texts, and songs, provides the empirical basis for the grammatical description. The documentary text collection, supplemented by data from elicitation work, questionnaires, and experiments, are accessible in the Bagyeli/Bakola collection of The Language Archive. With additional ethnographic, sociolinguistic, diachronic, and comparative remarks, the grammar may appeal to a wider audience in general linguistics, typology, Bantu studies, and anthropology. In 2019, the grammar received the Pāṇini Award by the Association for Linguistic Typology.
Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 1214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of the Muna Language written by René van den Berg and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The people who live in the Boumaa region of the Fijian island of Taveuni speak a dialect of Fijian that is mutually intelligible with Standard Fijian, the two differing as much perhaps as do the American and British varieties of English. During 1985, R. M. W. Dixon—one of the most insightful of linguists engaged in descriptive studies today—lived in the village of Waitabu and studied the language spoken there. He found in Boumaa Fijian a wealth of striking features unknown in commonly studied languages and on the basis of his fieldwork prepared this grammar. Fijian is an agglutinating language, one in which words are formed by the profligate combining of morphemes. There are no case inflections, and tense and aspect as shown by independent clitics or words within a predicate complex. Most verbs come in both transitive and intransitive forms, and nouns can be build up regularly from verbal parts and verbs from nouns. The language is also marked by a highly developed pronoun system and by a vocabulary rich in areas of social significance. In the opening chapters, Dixon describes the Islands' political, social, and linguistic organization, outlines the main points of Fijian phonology, and presents an overview of the grammar. In succeeding chapters, he examines a number of grammatical topics in greater detail, including clause and phrase structure, verbal syntax, deictics, and anaphora. The volume also includes a full vocabulary of all forms treated in discussion and three of the fifteen texts recorded from monolingual village elders on which the grammar is based.
Download or read book Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog written by Paul Kroeger and published by Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last twenty years or so, most of the work on the syntax of Philippine languages has been focused on the question of whether or not these languages can be said to have grammatical subjects, and if so which argument of a basic transitive clause should be analysed as being the subject. Paul Kroeger's contribution to this debate asserts that grammatical relations such as subject and object are syntactic notions, and must be identified on the basis of syntactic properties, rather than by semantic roles or discourse functions. A large number of syntactic processes in Tagalog uniquely select the argument which bears the nominative case. On the other hand, the data which have been used in the debate to assert the ambiguity of subjecthood are best analysed in terms of semantic rather than syntactic constraints. Together these facts support an analysis that takes the nominative argument as the subject. Kroeger examines the history of the subjecthood debate and uses data from Tagalog to test the theories that have been put forth. His conclusions entail consequences for certain linguistic concepts and theories, and lead Kroeger to assert that grammatical relations are not defined in terms of surface phrase structure configurations, contrary to the assumptions of many approaches to syntax including the Government-Binding theory. Paul Kroeger is presently doing fieldwork in Austronesian languages and teaching linguistics to fieldworkers from around the world.
Download or read book Locality History Memory written by Rita Mukherjee and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locality, History, Memory: The Making of the Citizen in South Asia was born out of the need to interrogate the tropes through which place, history and memory underpin notions of citizenship in present Southasia. Time as both time present and time past is framed here in two settings: as privileging both place (material or ideological site) and space. The latter refers to religion, oppression, marginalization and/or dalitisation. Time transcends both site/location and actual physical boundaries. Locality or location is therefore envisioned in terms of both actual place as well as a gateway to a larger space, in terms of a situation where historical memory negotiates the increasingly complex present. Agency and contingency therefore assume a critical importance here. Citizenship, far from being a discrete entity, is found to be multidimensional: it refers to formal status and the legal status of nationality and citizenship authenticated in the passport, but it also refers to rights and privileges; identity and solidarity, religious beliefs and a sense of belonging. Moving away from the role of the state, which has been at the centre of all inquiries on citizenship, we ask here the following questions in Locality, History, Memory: How does our history enforce or dilute the notion of the citizen? How far does memory strengthen or weaken it? What role does features not normally associated with citizenship such as access to natural resources, or ritual, faith and religion play in reinforcing such a status? History in the end is written by the historian and it was easy to map the changing methodologies used by the historians to essay the past but this is becoming increasingly difficult now. Another twist is the shift to hypertext at a popular level echoing what the late E H Carr had once called ‘bringing more and more people into history’. These so called alternative histories or people’s histories are becoming more and more popular because of the point at which we are located in time. Moreover, devices afforded by the new media enable these alternative histories to have an immediacy that the conventional historical format lacked. The collapse of state control over the new media has led to the resurgence of many archaic voices unimaginable just a decade ago.
Download or read book Traditions Tales and Proverbs of the Bali Nyonga written by Johannes Stöckle and published by Rudiger Koppe. This book was released on 1994 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Categorical are Categories written by Joanna Blaszczak and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the foundational question of category distinctions and challenges the traditional views from the modern theoretical and experimental perspective. Its focus is on the noun-verb, noun-adjective distinctions and categories occupying the "grey zone" between standard categories (e.g., nominalizations). This book will be of interest for researchers and students of linguistics and cognitive sciences.
Download or read book A History of African Linguistics written by H. Ekkehard Wolff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
Download or read book Voice syncretism written by Nicklas N. Bahrt and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive typological account of voice syncretism, focusing on resemblance in formal verbal marking between two or more of the following seven voices: passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. It covers voice syncretism from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and has been structured in a manner that facilitates convenient access to information about specific patterns of voice syncretism, their distribution and development. The book is based on a survey of voice syncretism in 222 geographically and genealogically diverse languages, but also thoroughly revisits previous research on the phenomenon. Voice syncretism is approached systematically by establishing and exploring patterns of voice syncretism that can logically be posited for the seven voices of focus in the book: 21 simplex patterns when one considers two of the seven voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal syncretism), and 99 complex patterns when one considers more than two of the voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal-anticausative syncretism). In a similar vein, 42 paths of development can logically be posited if it is assumed that voice marking in each of the seven voices can potentially develop one of the other six voice functions (e.g. reflexive voice marking developing a reciprocal function). This approach enables the discussion of both voice syncretism that has received considerable attention in the literature (notably middle syncretism involving the reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative and/or passive voices) and voice syncretism that has received little or not treatment in the past (including seemingly contradictory patterns such as causative-anticausative and passive-antipassive syncretism). In the survey almost all simplex patterns are attested in addition to seventeen complex patterns. In terms of diachrony, evidence is presented and discussed for twenty paths of development. The book strives to highlight the variation found in voice syncretism across the world’s languages and encourage further research into the phenomenon.
Download or read book The Psychology of Language written by Trevor A. Harley and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thorough revision and update of the popular second edition contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language: how we understand, produce, and store language.
Download or read book Comprehensive Dissertation Index written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 1206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Speech Language Processing written by Dan Jurafsky and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
