Download or read book Austronesian Undressed written by David Gil and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

Download or read book Number in the World s Languages written by Paolo Acquaviva and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strong development in research on grammatical number in recent years has created a need for a unified perspective. The different frameworks, the ramifications of the theoretical questions, and the diversity of phenomena across typological systems, make this a significant challenge. This book addresses the challenge with a series of in-depth analyses of number across a typologically diverse sample, unified by a common set of descriptive and analytic questions from a semantic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse perspective. Each case study is devoted to a single language, or in a few cases to a language group. They are written by specialists who can rely on first-hand data or on material of difficult access, and can place the phenomena in the context of the respective system. The studies are preceded and concluded by critical overviews which frame the discussion and identify the main results and open questions. With specialist chapters breaking new ground, this book will help number specialists relate their results to other theoretical and empirical domains, and it will provide a reliable guide to all linguists and other researchers interested in number.

Download or read book Cyclical Change Continued written by Elly van Gelderen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the typical stages and their stability, and the areal factors influencing cycles. The languages and language families that are considered in depth are Central Pomo, Cherokee, Chinese, English, French, Gbe, German, Hmong-Mien, Maipurean, Mayan, Mohawk, Mon-Khmer, Niger-Congo, Nupod, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai , Tuscarora, Ute, and Yoruboid. One paper covers several of the world’s language families. Cyclical change connects linguists working in various frameworks because it is exciting to find a reason behind this fascinating phenomenon.

Download or read book The Creole Debate written by John H. McWhorter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creoles have long been the subject of debate in linguistics, with many conflicting views, both on how they are formed, and what their political and linguistic status should be. Indeed, over the past twenty years, some creole specialists have argued that it has been wrong to think of creoles as anything but language blends in the same way that Yiddish is a blend of German and Hebrew and Slavic. Here, John H. McWhorter debunks the most widely accepted idea that creoles are created in the same way as 'children', taking characteristics from both 'parent' languages, and its underlying assumption that all historical and biological processes are the same. Instead, the facts support the original, and more interesting, argument that creoles are their own unique entity and are among the world's only genuinely new languages.

Download or read book Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia written by N.J. Enfield and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The studies in this book represent the rich, diverse and substantial research being conducted today in the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. The chapters cover a broad scope. Several studies address questions of language relatedness, often challenging conventional assumptions about the status of language contact as an explanatory factor in accounting for linguistic similarities. Several address the question of Mainland Southeast Asia as a linguistic area, exploring new ways to imagine and define the boundaries, and indeed the boundedness, of a Mainland Southeast Asia area. Two contributions rethink the received notion of the 'sesquisyllable' with new empirical and theoretical angles. And a set of chapters explores topics in the morphology and syntax of the region's languages, sometimes challenging orthodox assumptions and claims about what a typical language of Mainland Southeast Asia is like. Written by leading researchers in the field, and with a substantial overview of current knowledge and new directions by the volume editors N. J. Enfield and Bernard Comrie, this book will serve as an authoritative source on where the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia is at, and where it is heading.

Download or read book The Oxford Guide to the Malayo Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia written by Alexander Adelaar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-29 with total page 1089 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in Part II explore language contact between Malayo-Polynesian and unrelated languages, as well as sociolinguistic issues such as multilingualism, language policy, and language endangerment. Part III provides detailed overviews of the different groupings of Malayo-Polynesian languages, while Part IV offers in-depth studies of important typological features across the whole linguistic area. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia will be an essential reference for students and researchers specializing in Austronesian languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.

Download or read book Ancestral DNA Human Origins and Migrations written by Rene J. Herrera and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2018-06-13 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations describes the genesis of humans in Africa and the subsequent story of how our species migrated to every corner of the globe. Different phases of this journey are presented in an integrative format with information from a number of disciplines, including population genetics, evolution, anthropology, archaeology, climatology, linguistics, art, music, folklore and history. This unique approach weaves a story that has synergistic impact in the clarity and level of understanding that will appeal to those researching, studying, and interested in population genetics, evolutionary biology, human migrations, and the beginnings of our species. Integrates research and information from the fields of genetics, evolution, anthropology, archaeology, climatology, linguistics, art, music, folklore and history, among others Presents the content in an entertaining and synergistic style to facilitate a deep understanding of human population genetics Informs on the origins and recent evolution of our species in an approachable manner

Download or read book Comparative Austronesian Dictionary written by Darrell T. Tryon and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 3564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volumes in the Trends in Linguistics. Documentation series focus on the presentation of linguistic data. The series addresses the sustained interest in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, grammars and editions of under-described and hitherto undocumented languages. All world-regions and time periods are represented.

Download or read book The Papuan Languages of Timor Alor and Pantar Volume 3 written by Antoinette Schapper and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These volumes present sketches of the Papuan languages scattered over the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Together they give an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the unique and diverse grammars of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages, a family of 'Papuan outliers' located at the western perimeter of Melanesia. While largely undescribed until recently, the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages are now among the most intensively studied Papuan families. In this third volume, five new sketches of members of the family are presented, all written by specialist linguists on the basis of original field work.

Download or read book Paradigms regained Theoretical and empirical arguments for the reassessment of the notion of paradigm written by Gabriele Diewald and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume discusses the breadth of applications for an extended notion of paradigm. Paradigms in this sense are not only tools of morphological description but constitute the inherent structure of grammar. Grammatical paradigms are structural sets forming holistic, semiotic structures with an informational value of their own. We argue that as such, paradigms are a part of speaker knowledge and provide necessary structuring for grammaticalization processes. The papers discuss theoretical as well as conceptual questions and explore different domains of grammatical phenomena, ranging from grammaticalization, morphology, and cognitive semantics to modality, aiming to illustrate what the concept of grammatical paradigms can and cannot (yet) explain.

Download or read book The Papuan Languages of Timor Alor and Pantar written by Antoinette Schapper and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 3 brings together 5 grammatical sketches of previously undescribed TAP languages. The 3 volumes of TAP grammars present a full cross-section of the geographical spread and linguistic diversity within the family. Sketches are written by specia

Download or read book A Grammatical Sketch of Hainan Cham written by Graham Thurgood and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-06-18 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham, an endangered tonal Austronesian language. The study focuses on three areas: social background and contact history, the grammar (including all the recorded vocabulary), and a description of the sound system (including acoustic description). The appendixes also include the wordlist of Sanya Chinese forms and four analyzed texts.

Download or read book Traces of Contact in the Lexicon written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-01-23 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

Download or read book Human Dispersal and Species Movement written by Nicole Boivin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-27 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have humans colonised the entire planet and reshaped its ecosystems in the process? This unique and groundbreaking collection of essays explores human movement through time, the impacts of these movements on landscapes and other species, and the ways in which species have co-evolved and transformed each other as a result. Exploring the spread of people, plants, animals, and diseases through processes of migration, colonisation, trade and travel, it assembles a broad array of case studies from the Pliocene to the present. The contributors from disciplines across the humanities and natural sciences are senior or established scholars in the fields of human evolution, archaeology, history, and geography.

Download or read book Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity written by John H. McWhorter and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

Download or read book A grammar of Kalamang written by Eline Visser and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people in the villages Mas and Antalisa on the biggest of the Karas Islands, which lie just off the coast of Bomberai Peninsula. This work is the first comprehensive grammar of a Papuan language in the Bomberai area. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. This grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other West Bomberai or eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment. This grammar is accompanied by an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material and a dictionary with 2700 lemmas. It serves as a document of one of the world's many endangered languages.

Download or read book Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics written by Kunio Nishiyama and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dedicated to John B. Whitman, this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Austronesian, Indo-Aryan, and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics, acquisition, processing and phonology, from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives, this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests, which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.