Download or read book Ingush Grammar written by Johanna Nichols and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive reference grammar of Ingush, a language of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian language family of the central Caucasus (southern Russia). Ingush is notable for its complex phonology, prosody including minimal tone system, complex morphology of both nouns and verbs, clause chaining, long-distance reflexivization, and extreme degree of syntactic ergativity.
Download or read book Ghalghaai ingalsii Ingalsii ghalghaai Lughat written by Johanna Nichols and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bilingual dictionary is the very first of its kind and contains about 6,000 words of essential vocabulary for Ingush.
Download or read book Case and Grammatical Relations written by Greville G. Corbett and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.
Download or read book Heads in Grammatical Theory written by Greville G. Corbett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-06-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the idea of the 'head' or dominating element of a phrase.
Download or read book Language Contact in the Territory of the Former Soviet Union written by Diana Forker and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies and systematically investigates the impact of Russian at all linguistic levels, from the lexicon to the domains of grammar to discourse, and with varying types of outcomes such as relatively rapid language shift, structural changes in a relatively stable contact situation, pidginization and super variability at the post-pidgin stage. The volume appeals to linguists studying language contact and contact-induced language change from a broad range of perspectives, who want to gain insight into how one of the largest languages in the world influences other smaller languages, but also experts of mostly minority languages in the sphere of the former Soviet Union.
Download or read book The Chechens written by Amjad M. Jaimoukha and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a ready introduction and practical guide to the Chechen people, including chapters on history, religion, politics, economy, culture, literature and media.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact written by Anthony P. Grant and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every language has been influenced in some way by other languages. In many cases, this influence is reflected in words which have been absorbed from other languages as the names for newer items or ideas, such as perestroika, manga, or intifada (from Russian, Japanese, and Arabic respectively). In other cases, the influence of other languages goes deeper, and includes the addition of new sounds, grammatical forms, and idioms to the pre-existing language. For example, English's structure has been shaped in such a way by the effects of Norse, French, Latin, and Celtic--though English is not alone in its openness to these influences. Any features can potentially be transferred from one language to another if the sociolinguistic and structural circumstances allow for it. Further, new languages--pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages--can come into being as the result of language contact. In thirty-three chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact examines the various forms of contact-induced linguistic change and the levels of language which have provided instances of these influences. In addition, it provides accounts of how language contact has affected some twenty languages, spoken and signed, from all parts of the world. Chapters are written by experts and native-speakers from years of research and fieldwork. Ultimately, this Handbook provides an authoritative account of the possibilities and products of contact-induced linguistic change.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 1189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages. This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.
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 Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution written by Maggie Tallerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars present critical accounts of every aspect of the field, including work in animal behaviour; anatomy, genetics and neurology; the prehistory of language; the development of our uniquely linguistic species; and language creation, transmission, and change.
Download or read book Current Trends in Caucasian East European and Inner Asian Linguistics written by Dee Ann Holisky and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of seventeen papers, on languages of all three indigenous Caucasian families as well as other languages spoken in the territory of the former Soviet Union. Several papers are concerned with diachronic questions, either within individual families, or at deeper time depths. Some authors utilize their field data to address problems of general linguistic interest, such as reflexivization. A number of papers look at the evidence for contact-induced change in multilingual areas. Some of the most exciting contributions to the collection represent significant advances in the reconstruction of the prehistory of such understudied language families as Northeast Caucasian, Tungusic and the baffling isolate Ket. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the indigenous languages of the former USSR, but also to historical and synchronic linguists seeking to familiarize themselves with the fascinating, typologically diverse languages from the interior of the Eurasian continent. Dee Ann Holisky is Professor of English and Linguistics, and Associate Dean for Academic Programs of the College of Arts & Sciences at George Mason University. She is the author of Aspect and Georgian Medial Verbs (Caravan Books, 1981) and of numerous articles on Georgian and Kartvelian linguistics. Kevin Tuite is Professor of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. Among his books are An Anthology of Georgian Folk Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994) and Ethnolinguistics and Anthropological Theory (co-edited with Christine Jourdan; Montréal: Éditions Fides, 2003).
Download or read book The Grammar of Knowledge written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grammar of Knowledge offers both a linguistic and anthropological perspective on the expression of information sources, as well as inferences, assumptions, probability and possibility, and gradations of doubt and beliefs in a range of languages. The book investigates twelve different languages, from families including Tibeto-Burman, Nakh-Dagestani, and Austronesian, all of which share the property of requiring the source of information to be specified in every sentence. In these languages, it may not be possible to say merely that 'the man went fishing'. Instead, the source of evidence for the statement must also be specified, usually through the use of evidential markers. For example, it may be necessary to indicate whether the speaker saw the man go fishing; has simply assumed that the man went fishing; or was told that he went fishing by a third party. Some languages, such as Hinuq and Tatar, distinguish between first-hand and non first-hand information sources; others, such as Ersu, mark three distinct types of information - directly required, inferred or assumed, and reported. Some require an even greater level of specification: Ashéninka Perené, from South America, has a specific marker to express suspicions or misgivings. Like others in the series, the book illustrates and examines these aspects of language in different cultural and linguistic settings. It will interest linguists of all persuasions as well as linguistically-minded anthropologists.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity written by Jessica Coon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.
Download or read book An Areal Typology of Agreement Systems written by Ranko Matasović and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first areal-typological exploration of agreement systems in the world's languages.
Download or read book Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing written by Emily M. Bender and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many NLP tasks have at their core a subtask of extracting the dependencies—who did what to whom—from natural language sentences. This task can be understood as the inverse of the problem solved in different ways by diverse human languages, namely, how to indicate the relationship between different parts of a sentence. Understanding how languages solve the problem can be extremely useful in both feature design and error analysis in the application of machine learning to NLP. Likewise, understanding cross-linguistic variation can be important for the design of MT systems and other multilingual applications. The purpose of this book is to present in a succinct and accessible fashion information about the morphological and syntactic structure of human languages that can be useful in creating more linguistically sophisticated, more language-independent, and thus more successful NLP systems. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction/motivation / Morphology: Introduction / Morphophonology / Morphosyntax / Syntax: Introduction / Parts of speech / Heads, arguments, and adjuncts / Argument types and grammatical functions / Mismatches between syntactic position and semantic roles / Resources / Bibliography / Author's Biography / General Index / Index of Languages
Download or read book Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I written by Francesca Di Garbo and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 349 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 The Semantics of Verbal Categories in Nakh Daghestanian Languages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the semantics of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality in the North-East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) language family. It offers an overview of the most challenging features and provides in-depth studies of selected TAME systems in a number of languages.
