Download or read book Bininj Gun wok written by Nicholas Evans and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the language and its speakers; brief overview of the major dialects: Kunwinjku, Gun-djeihmi, Kune Narayek and Kune Dulerayek, Kuninjku, Gun-dedjnjenghemi, Manyallaluk Mayali, clan lects and second language varieties; comprehensive analysis of the language; includes eleven transcriptions of language speakers.

Download or read book Australian Languages written by Claire Bowern and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses controversial issues in the application of the comparative method to the languages of Australia which have recently come to international prominence. Are these languages 'different' in ways that challenge the fundamental assumptions of historical linguistics? Can subgrouping be successfully undertaken using the Comparative Method? Is the genetic construct of a far-flung 'Pama-Nyungan' language family supportable by classic methods of reconstruction? Contrary to increasingly established views of the Australian scene, this book makes a major contribution to the demonstration that traditional methods can indeed be applied to these languages. These studies, introduced by chapters on subgrouping methodology and the history of Australian linguistic classification, rigorously apply the comparative method to establishing subgroups among Australian languages and justifying the phonology of Proto-Pama-Nyungan. Individual chapters can profitably be read either for their contribution to Australian linguistic prehistory or as case studies in the application of the comparative method. Contributions by: B. Alpher; B. Baker; C. Bowern; C. Bowern & H. Koch; G. Breen; L. Campbell; I. Green & R. Nordlinger; L. Hercus & P. Austin; H. Koch; P. McConvell & M. Laughren; L. Miceli; G. O'Grady & K. L. Hale; J. Simpson & L. Hercus.

Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of Australia written by Harold Koch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed.

Download or read book The Dynamics of Nominal Classification written by Ruth Singer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of grammatical gender in the Australian language Mawng calls into question prevailing ideas about the functions of nominal classification systems. Mawng’s gender system has a strong semantic basis and plays an important role in the construction of meaning in discourse. Gender agreement in verbs is frequently lexicalized, creating idioms called lexicalised agreement verbs that are structurally similar to noun-verb idioms. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in nominal classification or cross-linguistic approaches to idioms.

Download or read book Understanding Human Time written by Kasia M. Jaszczolt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the time that we (think we) experience and the concept of time in our beliefs, our knowledge, and our fears. We believe that time passes, we know that death is inevitable, we fear that we are going to be late. How do these human feelings and sensations of time relate to metaphysical time of tenseless reality? What do different languages tell us about the nature of human time? And what exactly is the flow of time? The chapters in this volume bring together insights from linguists and philosophers to examine questions about time on the micro-level of physical reality, as well as time in language and discourse on the macro-level of social reality. The unifying theme is that in order to understand human time we have to discover not only how we think and speak about time, but also what it is that makes us think and speak about it in a certain way.

Download or read book The Grammar of Thinking written by Daniela E. Casartelli and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentence (1) represents the phenomenon of reported thought, (2) that of reported speech: (1) Sasha thought: "This is fine" or Sasha thought that this would be fine (2) Sasha said: "This is fine" or Sasha said that this would be fine While sentences as in (1) have often been discussed in the context of those in (2) the former have rarely received specific attention. This has meant that much of the semantic and structural complexity, cross-linguistic variation, as well as the precise relation between (1) and (2) and related phenomena have remained unstudied. Addressing this gap, this volume represents the first collection of studies specifically dedicated to reported thought. It introduces a wide variety of cross-linguistic examples of the phenomenon and brings together authors from linguistic typology, corpus and interactional linguistics, and formal and functional theories of syntax to shed light on how talking about thoughts can become grammar in the languages of the world. The book should be of interest to linguists, philosophers of language, linguistic anthropologists and communication specialists seeking to understand topics at the boundary of stylistics and morphosyntax, as well as the grammar of epistemicity.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis written by Michael Fortescue and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

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 The Language of Emotions written by Maïa Ponsonnet and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Language of Emotions: The case of Dalabon (Australia) is the first extensive study of the linguistic encoding of emotions in an Australian language, and further, in an endangered, non-European language. Based on first-hand data collected using innovative methods, the monograph describes and analyzes how Dalabon speakers express emotions (using interjections, prosody, evaluative morphology) and the words they use to describe and discuss emotions. Like many languages, Dalabon makes broad use of body-part words in descriptions of emotions. The volume analyzes the figurative functions of these body-part words, as well as their non-figurative functions. Correlations between linguistic features and cultural patterns are systematically questioned. Beyond Australianists and linguists working on emotions, the book will be of interest to anthropological linguists, cognitive linguists, or linguists working on discourse and communication for instance. It is accessible also to non-linguists with an interest in language, in particular anthropologists and psychologists.

Download or read book Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country written by Jean-Christophe Verstraete and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-02-18 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic, anthropological, archaeological and historical work focused on Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, in Australia’s northeast. The volume also honours Bruce Rigsby, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, whose work has inspired all of the contributors. The papers in the volume are organized in terms of five key themes, including the use of historical and archaeological methods to reconstruct aspects of language and social organization, anthropological and linguistic work uncovering aspects of world view embedded in languages and ethnographic data sets, the study of post-contact transformations in language and society, and the return of archival data to communities. Its thematic intersections draw together the varied disciplinary threads in an overview of the cultures and languages of the region, and will appeal to all those interested in Australian Aboriginal studies, linguistics, anthropology and associated disciplines.

Download or read book A Survey of Word Accentual Patterns in the Languages of the World written by Harry van der Hulst and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In part I of this volume, experts on various language areas provide surveys of word stress/accent systems of as many languages in 'their' part of the world as they could lay their hands on. No preconditions (theoretical or otherwise) were set, but the authors were encouraged to use the StressTyp data in their chapters. Australian Languages (Rob Goedemans), Austronesian Languages (Ellen van Zanten, Ruben Stoel and Bert Remijsen), Papuan Languages (Ellen van Zanten and Philomena Dol), North American Languages (Keren Rice), South American Languages (Sergio Meira and Leo Wetzels), African Languages (Laura Downing), European Languages (Harry van der Hulst), Asian Languages (Harry van der Hulst and René Schiering), Middle Eastern Languages (Harry van der Hulst and Sam Hellmuth). There is an introductory chapter (Chapter 1) that will provide the reader with elementary terminology and theoretical tools to understand the variety of accentual systems that will be discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Chapter 2 has a double function. It presents an overview of stress patterns in Australian languages, but at the same time it is intended to (re-)familiarize readers with the coding, terminology and theoretical ideas of the StressTyp database. Chapter 11 presents statistical and typological information from the StressTyp database. Part II of this volume contains 'language profiles' which are, for each of the 511 languages contained in StressTyp (in 2009), extracts from the information that is contained in the database. This volume will be of interest to people in the field of theoretical phonology and language typology. It will function as a reference work for these groups of researchers, but also, more generally, for people working on syntax and other fields of linguistics, who might wish to know certain basic facts about the distribution of word accent systems

Download or read book An Areal Typology of Agreement Systems written by Ranko Matasović and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying over 300 languages, this typological study presents new theoretical insights into the nature of agreement, as well as empirical findings about the distribution of agreement patterns in the world's languages. Focussing primarily on agreement in gender, number and person, but with reference to agreement in other smaller categories, Ranko Matasović aims to discover which patterns of agreement are widespread and common in languages, and which are rather limited in their distribution. He sheds new light on a range of important theoretical questions such as what agreement actually is, what areal, typological and genetic patterns exist across agreement systems, and what problems in the analysis of agreement remain unresolved.

Download or read book The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages written by Claire Bowern and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 1179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages is a wide-ranging reference work that explores the more than 550 traditional and new Indigenous languages of Australia. Australian languages have long played an important role in diachronic and synchronic linguistics and are a vital testing ground for linguistic theory. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive and accessible guide to the their vast linguistic diversity. This volume fills that gap, bringing together leading scholars and junior researchers to provide an up-to-date guide to all aspects of the languages of Australia. The chapters in the book explore typology, documentation, and classification; linguistic structures from phonology to pragmatics and discourse; sociolinguistics and language variation; and language in the community. The final part offers grammatical sketches of a selection of languages, sub-groups, and families. At a time when the number of living Australian languages is significantly reduced even compared to twenty year ago, this volume establishes priorities for future linguistic research and contributes to the language expansion and revitalization efforts that are underway.

Download or read book Cross linguistic Semantics of Tense Aspect and Modality written by Lotte Hogeweg and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface -- 1. The semantics of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world / Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Malchukov -- 2. Incompatible categories: Resolving the 'present perfective paradox' / Andrej L. Malchukov -- 3. The perfective/imperfective distinction: Coercion or aspectual operators? / Corien Bary -- 4. Lexical and compositional factors in the aspectual system of Adyghe / Peter M. Arkadiev -- 5. Event structure of non-culminating accomplishments / Sergei Tatevosov & Mikhail Ivanov -- 6. The grammaticalised use of the Burmese verbs la 'come' and .wà 'go' / Nicoletta Romeo -- 7. Irrealis in Yurakaré and other languages: On the cross-linguistic consistency of an elusive category / Rik van Gijn & Sonja Gipper -- 8. On the selection of mood in complement clauses / Rui Marques -- 9. 'Out of control' marking as circumstantial modality in St'át'imcets / Henry Davis, Lisa Matthewson & Hotze Rullmann -- 10. Modal geometry: Remarks on the structure of a modal map / Kees de Schepper & Joost Zwarts -- 11. Acquisitive modals / Johan van der Auwera, Petar Kehayov & Alice Vittrant -- 12. Conflicting constraints on the interpretation of modal auxiliaries / Ad Foolen & Helen de Hoop -- 13. Modality and context dependence / Fabrice Nauze -- 14. Verbal semantic shifts under negation, intensionality, and imperfectivity: Russian genitive objects / Barbara H. Partee & Vladimir Borschev -- 15. The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the semantic parallels between aspect and evidential categories / Anne Tamm -- Index.

Download or read book Give Constructions across Languages written by Myriam Bouveret and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cognitive contrastive study of ten languages (Chinese, Dalabon, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Kurdish, Khmer, Polish, Tibetan) focuses on the concept of giving from six main points of view, namely argument structure, lexical semantics and event structure, role marking in the three argument construction and in other constructions, lexicalization, grammaticalization and constructionalization of the verb from a cognitive construction grammar point of view, and central and extended meanings. It is proposed that a continuum approach to grammar and lexicon is needed in order to describe the typological and historical facts. The volume argues for a concrete and abstract transfer ‘cluster model’ involving coverage of lexical and grammatical extension or bleaching phenomena and that the semantic extensions (metaphorical and otherwise) exploit various portions of this schema. The volume is deeply anchored in the Cognitive Construction Grammar theoretical movement, and proposes analyses of constructional phenomena to illustrate a grammar to lexicon continuum, in synchrony and diachrony: language change, grammaticalization chains, constructionalization analysis, and an invariant hypothesis of giving as a basic activity in human cognition.

Download or read book Predicative Possession written by Leon Stassen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 831 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering work draws on on data from over 400 languages from a wide range of language families to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession. It examines their interdependence with other typologies, and explores varieties of related grammaticalization processes.

Download or read book Agreement written by Greville G. Corbett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description