Download or read book An Outline of Bukiyip Grammar written by Robert J. Conrad and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Outline of Bukiyip Grammar written by Robert J. Conrad and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discourse Grammar and Typology written by Werner Abraham and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines papers selected for their affinity with work on discourse analysis and language typology. The methodological platform is the authors' conviction that all linguistic work needs to be empirical in the sense that (1) generalizations are to be made on the basis of spoken texts in larger contexts, (2) generalizations are correct only as long as pertinent linguistic material does not contradict them, and (3) that linguistic categories and rules are of a temporal nature. In this sense, the contributions represent 'functional typological' comparison, often of languages not frequently investigated. The papers are arranged in 5 groups: Transitivity and voice; Clausal modality; Typology and discourse categories; Language and Culture; Functionality.
Download or read book Measuring Grammatical Complexity written by Frederick J. Newmeyer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. The volume differs from others devoted to the question of complexity in language in that the authors all approach the problem from the point of view of formal grammatical theory, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics. Chapters investigate a number of key issues in grammatical complexity, taking phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic considerations into account. These include what is often called the 'trade-off problem', namely whether complexity in one grammatical component is necessarily balanced by simplicity in another; and the question of interpretive complexity, that is, whether and how one might measure the difficulty for the hearer in assigning meaning to an utterance and how such complexity might be factored in to an overall complexity assessment. Measuring Grammatical Complexity brings together a number of distinguished scholars in the field, and will be of interest to linguists of all theoretical stripes from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those working in the areas of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.
Download or read book Language Typology and Syntactic Description Volume 1 Clause Structure written by Timothy Shopen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique three-volume survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each new concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Volume I covers parts-of-speech systems, word order, the noun phrase, clause types, speech act distinctions, the passive, and information packaging in the clause.
Download or read book Participles written by Ksenia Shagal and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the first large-scale typological study of participles, based on data from more than 100 languages. Its main aim is to model the diversity of non-finite verb forms involved in adnominal modification. Participles are examined with respect to several morphological and syntactic parameters, and are shown to be a versatile cross-linguistic category. The book is of interest to language typologists and descriptive linguists.
Download or read book Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek written by Katerina Chatzopoulou and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek. It draws on both quantitative data from texts dating from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, and Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from all stages of the language, from Homeric Greek to Standard Modern Greek. Katerina Chatzopoulou accounts for the contrast between the two complementary negators found in Greek, referred to as a NEG1 and NEG2, in terms of the latter's sensitivity to nonveridicality, and explains the asymmetry observed in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system. The volume also sets out a new interpretation of Jespersen's cycle, which abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological properties of the phenomenon and proposes instead that it is best understood in semantic terms. This approach not only explains the patterns observed in Greek, but also those found in other languages that deviate from the traditional description of Jespersen's cycle.
Download or read book New Challenges in Typology written by Patience Epps and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his (1921) book, Language, Sapir made the famous observation, “All grammars leak” (38). By this he meant that within the systematic paradigms, rules and routinized patterns of any grammar, we always find a few irregularities and surprises. The same can be said for linguistic typologies. Typological theories are critical tools for linguists, for exploring differences and similarities among languages, for learning about the cognitive factors and social practices that make languages the way they are, and for making predictions about other properties of languages that are members of a certain type. So what do we do when a typology leaks? This paper follows the spirit of such work as Aske (1989) on path types and Mithun and Chafe (1999) on grammatical relations types to understand the grammatical and functional motivations of language-internal typological diversity: that is, why and how a single language uses patterns and constructions of more than one type. .
Download or read book The Crosslinguistics of Zero Marking of Spatial Relations written by Thomas Stolz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the basis of a world-wide convenience sample of 116 languages, the distribution of zero-marking of spatial relations over the languages of the world is shown to largely escape any genetically, areally and/or typologically based constraints. The main goal of this book is to firmly establish the cross-linguistic occurrence of the zero-marking of spatial relations and to provide a framework for its study in terms of economy and predictability.
Download or read book The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking written by Michael Cysouw and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores person markers, the linguistic elements that provide points of reference to speech-act participants. Michael Cysouw develops a new framework for the typology of person marking based on the rejection of the notion of plurality for its analysis. When a mother says "Mummy is going to say goodnight now", Mummy is the person marker in a way that in English is confined to motherese but which is used more commonly in some other languages and may also be characteristic of much earlier forms. Dr Cysouw divides the person markers of 400 languages into paradigms. He considers how the structure of these person paradigms relates to their function. His investigation provides a clear account of how person markers work syntactically, pragmatically, and semantically as well as giving fresh insights into aspects of linguistic change, language-relatedness, and the interfaces between discourse, syntax, and semantics. The combination of a typological and a comparative approach results in the first outline of a cognitive map of the paradigmatic structure of person marking.
Download or read book Phonological Typology written by Matthew K. Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of phonological typology: the study of how sounds are distributed across the languages of the world and why they display these distributions and patterns. It examines major phonological phenomena such as phoneme inventories, syllable structure, phonological alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology, and investigates issues including how common certain types of sounds are cross-linguistically and why; how many languages differentiate questions and statements using intonation; which areas of the world tend to be associated with more complex tone distinctions; and the relationship between cross-linguistic and language-internal frequency. Data are drawn from existing typologies, from the results of a survey of various phonological patterns in the 100-language sample from the World Atlas of Language Structures, and from corpora of individual languages. Matthew Gordon analyses these data and explores the correlations between different - often superficially unrelated - phonological properties to gain insight into the driving forces behind these phenomena. He provides an overview of synchronic and diachronic explanations for the patterns observed and discusses how formal phonological theory has attempted to model the typological data. One of relatively few typological works devoted to phonology, this book will be a valuable resource for phonologists and phoneticians from advanced undergraduate level upwards, as well all those with an interest in language typology.
Download or read book Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I written by Francesca Di Garbo and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.
Download or read book Cross Disciplinary Issues in Compounding written by Sergio Scalise and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of compounds is currently at the center of attention in many areas of both theoretical and applied linguistics. This volume brings together contributions by experts involved in a wide range of such areas, based on a large number of diverse languages – spoken and signed. The fact that compound constructions are at the interface of the various components of language – morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics – makes them ideal testing grounds for models of grammatical architecture, as seen in a number of these chapters. The breadth and depth of the coverage of topics, as well as the unified bibliography, make this volume a basic reference source for those interested in current theoretical as well as experimental approaches to compounding, and thus to theoretical linguists as well as psycholinguists and researchers in related fields of cognitive science.
Download or read book New Challenges in Typology written by Matti Miestamo and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixteen chapters in this volume are written by typologists and typologically oriented field linguists who have completed their Ph.D. theses in the first four years of this millennium. The authors address selected theoretical questions of general linguistic relevance drawing from a wealth of data hitherto unfamiliar to the general linguistic audience. The general aim is to broaden the horizons of typology by revisiting existing typologies with larger language samples, exploring domains not considered in typology before, taking linguistic diversity more seriously, strengthening the connection between typology and areal linguistics, and bridging the gap to other fields, such as historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The papers cover grammatical phenomena from phonology, morphology up to the syntax of complex sentences. The linguistic phenomena scrutinized include the following: foot and stress, tone, infixation, inflection vs. derivation, word formation, polysynthesis, suppletion, person marking, reflexives, alignment, transitivity, tense-aspect-mood systems, negation, interrogation, converb systems, and complex sentences. More general methodological and theoretical issues, such as reconstruction, markedness, semantic maps, templates, and use of parallel corpora, are also addressed. The contributions in this volume draw from many traditional fields of linguistics simultaneously, and show that it is becoming harder and maybe also less desirable to keep them separate, especially when taking a broadly cross-linguistic approach to language. The book is of interest to typologists and field linguists, as well as to any linguists interested in theoretical issues in different subfields of linguistics.
Download or read book Suppletion in Verb Paradigms written by Ljuba N. Veselinova and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines stem change in verb paradigms, as in English go 'go.PRESENT' vs. went 'go.PAST', a phenomenon referred to as suppletion in current linguistic theory. The work is based on a broad sample of 193 languages, and examines this long neglected phenomenon from a typological perspective. In addition to identifying types of suppletion which occur cross-linguistically, the study brings to light areal patterns of the occurrence of suppletive forms in verb paradigms. Several hypotheses as regards the diachronic development of suppletive forms are presented as well. The author also seeks to explore the methodological issues of evaluating the frequency of linguistic features in large language samples by introducing a method of weighting languages according to their genetic relatedness. All figures obtained in this way are compared to the proportions yielded by more familiar counting methods, and the results and implications of the different procedures are compared and discussed throughout.
Download or read book Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe written by Anna Siewierska and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Standard Negation written by Matti Miestamo and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation – the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses – is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, i.e. asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc.) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types – symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.
