Download or read book Epistemic modality in spoken standard Tibetian epistemic verbal endings and copulas written by Zuzana Vokurková and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph deals with the grammatical expression of epistemic modalities in standard spoken Tibetan. It describes the system of various types of epistemic verbal endings and epistemic copulas frequently employed in the spoken language, as well as those that occur less frequently. These verbal endings are analyzed from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic viewpoints, and illustrated by examples.
Download or read book Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross Linguistic Perspective written by Zlatka Guentchéva and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.
Download or read book A Grammar of Purik Tibetan written by Marius Zemp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Grammar of Purik Tibetan, Marius Zemp offers a comprehensive description of the phonologically archaic Tibetan variety spoken in Kargil, the capital of a region called Purik, situated in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India. This book contains the most thorough and insightful description of the verbal system of a Tibetic language yet written and will be particularly relevant for scholars studying evidentiality. It also includes highly valuable discussions of a syntactically and pragmatically well-defined class of ideophones which Zemp calls “dramatizers” and of prosody – topics which are too often neglected in language descriptions. Finally, this book goes beyond what others have done in that Purik data are used to elucidate our understanding of Classical Tibetan and its origins.
Download or read book Modality in Syntax Semantics and Pragmatics written by Werner Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.
Download or read book Egophoricity written by Simeon Floyd and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically, a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs, while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages, egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world, including languages of Western China, the Andean region of South America, the Caucasus, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective, interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation.
Download or read book Language Interrupted written by John McWhorter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" -- Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. Linguist John McWhorter agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become a hot issue in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. As McWhorter describes, when languages came into contact over the years (when French speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly, and this came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non-interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. McWhorter makes the case that this kind of simplification happens in degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simply simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. He analyzes how various languages that seem simple but are not creoles, actually are simpler than they would be if they had not been broken down by large numbers of adult learners. In addition to English, he looks at Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Malay, and some Arabic varieties. His work will interest not just experts in creole studies and historical linguistics, but the wider community interested in language complexity.
Download or read book Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages written by Lauren Gawne and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
Download or read book A Grammar of Tshangla written by Erik E. Andvik and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Grammar of Tshangla" is the first major linguistic description of Tshangla, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Bhutan, northeast India, and southwest China. Written from a functional-typological perspective, it contains a wealth of illustrative examples both from elicited data and from spontaneously generated texts. It is a truly comprehensive description, including sections on phonology, lexicon, morphophonemics, morphosyntactic structure, clause-concatenating constructions, as well as discourse-pragmatic features. The volume will be of interest to language students, and to linguists and ethnographic scholars seeking to understand the Bhutanese and South Asian linguistic situation. The large amount of raw language data presented here make this "Grammar of Tshangla" an indispensable tool for students of Tibeto-Burman comparative linguistics and morphosyntactic theory in general.
Download or read book A Grammar of Dumi written by George van Driem and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 1993 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dumi Rai is a Kiranti language spoken in Khotan district in the Everest zone of eastern Nepal. The Dumi speaking area is limited to five pancayats all abutting the Rava and Tap rivers near their confluence and upriver therefrom. The Dumi are now a minority in the area to which they are indigenous (constituting roughly a quarter of the population in Khotan district); retention is low and surviving speakers of Dumi are scarce. The material in this volume likely will comprise what is saved of the language for posterity. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Studies in Evidentiality written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session.
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 Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 1661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
Download or read book The Evolution of Grammar written by Joan Bybee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.
Download or read book Relevance Pragmatics and Interpretation written by Kate Scott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showcases recent research by leading scholars working within the relevance-theoretic pragmatics framework.
Download or read book Degree Gradation of Verbs written by Jens Fleischhauer-Helfer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gradation is usually considered to be a property of adjectives. Examples like 'The boy loves his mother very much' and 'The boy has grown a lot' reveal that gradation is not limited to adjectives but verbs are gradable too. Verb gradation has received considerably less attention in the literature than gradation of adjectives. The aim of the current volume is to explore the notion of verb gradation in more detail. The book presents a semantic as well as a syntactic analysis of verb gradation and combines three case studies with a general perspective on the phenomenon. Issues addressed in the volume cover, among others, the notion of scalarity in the verbal domain, the interaction of verb gradation with grammatical as well as lexical aspect and verb gradation as a subcompositional phenomenon. These topics are investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. The languages of investigation include, among others, German, Russian and French.
Download or read book A Grammar of Kurt p written by Gwendolyn Hyslop and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A grammar of Kurtöp presents the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of northeastern Bhutan. When possible, data are presented in a comparative light, lending insight into the development of phenomena such as tonogenesis and nominalizations.
Download or read book A Grammar of Dongwang Tibetan written by Ellen Lynn Bartee and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter Eleven describes simple clause types in Dongwang and Chapter Twelve discusses combinations of clauses such as relative clauses, complement clauses and clause chains.
