Download or read book Kilivila written by Gunter Senft and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.
Download or read book Practical Theories and Empirical Practice written by Andrea C. Schalley and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a perceived tension between empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Many recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an 'empirical science'. This volume argues for a nuanced view, highlighting that theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. Its contributions ranging from experimental studies in psychology via linguistic fieldwork and cross-linguistic comparisons to the application of formal and logical approaches to language exemplify the mutual relationship between empirical and theoretical work. The volume illustrates how selected topics are addressed by different contributions and methodological stances. Topics include the cognitive grounding of language, social cognition and the construction of meaning in interaction, and, closely related, pragmatics from a typological perspective and beyond. Anyone interested in these topics and more generally in meta-theoretical considerations will find great value in this volume.
Download or read book The Trobriand Islanders Ways of Speaking written by Gunter Senft and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bronislaw Maliniowski claimed in his monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific that to approach the goal of ethnographic field-work, requires a "collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae ... as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality". This book finally meets Malinowski's demand. Based on more than 40 months of field research the author presents, documents and illustrates the Trobriand Islanders' own indigenous typology of text categories or genres, covering the spectrum from ditties children chant while spinning a top, to gossip, songs, tales, and myths. The typology is based on Kilivila metalinguistic terms for these genres, and considers the relationship they have with registers or varieties which are also metalinguistically distinguished by the native speakers of this language. Rooted in the 'ethnography of speaking' paradigm and in the 'anthropological linguistics/linguistic anthropology' approach, the book highlights the relevance of genres for researching the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction, and demonstrates the importance of understanding genres for achieving linguistic and cultural competence. In addition to the data presented in the book, its readers have the opportunity to access the original audio- and video-data presented via the internet on a special website, which mirrors the structure of the book. Thus, the reader can check the transcriptions against the original data recordings. This makes the volume particularly valuable for teaching purposes in (general, Austronesian/ Oceanic, documentary, and anthropological) linguistics and ethnology.
Download or read book Grammars of Space written by Stephen C. Levinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-14 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial language - that is, the way languages structure the spatial domain – is an important area of research, offering insights into one of the most central areas of human cognition. In this collection, a team of leading scholars review the spatial domain across a wide variety of languages. Contrary to existing assumptions, they show that there is great variation in the way space is conceptually structured across languages, thus substantiating the controversial question of how far the foundations of human cognition are innate. Grammars of Space is a supplement to the psychological information provided in its companion volume, Space in Language and Cognition. It represents a new kind of work in linguistics, 'Semantic Typology', which asks what are the semantic parameters used to structure particular semantic fields. Comprehensive and informative, it will be essential reading for those working on comparative linguistics, spatial cognition, and the interface between them.
Download or read book The Oceanic Languages written by John Lynch and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 942 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume contains five background chapters: The Oceanic Languages, Sociolinguistic Background, Typological Overview, Proto-Oceanic and Internal Subgrouping. Part of 2 vol set. Author Ross from ANU.
Download or read book The Kula written by Jerry W. Leach and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1983-05-19 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imdeduya written by Gunter Senft and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.
Download or read book Marquesan written by Gabriele H. Cablitz and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the linguistic and semantic encodings and conceptions of space in the East-Polynesian language Marquesan by focusing on the great variety of language- and culture-specific ways of referring to space, thus documenting an essential part of human behaviour and everyday communication in a South Pacific island population. On the basis of a large corpus of both natural and elicited spoken language data the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of all relevant lexical and grammatical units and constructions used for spatial reference are analysed in detail. Remarkable for this language is the fact that a particular kind of spatial orientation system based on local landmarks of the environment - a so-called 'absolute system' - is used for spatial description even on a micro-level or so-called 'table-top' space. Marquesan - A Grammar of Space is the first comprehensive description and in-depth study of spatial language to be found in an Austronesian language. Apart from examining the complex sociolinguistic situation, the degree of language endangerment in the bilingual speech community and the resulting rapid linguistic change in spatial language use, the book also offers a detailed description of the theoretical background of 'language and space' research and the linguistic variability to be found across languages. Moreover, the volume contains an extensive grammatical sketch of Marquesan which complements the language description of the specific domain space in a useful way providing the reader with general insights into one of the not well documented Oceanic languages. The volume addresses linguists, psycholinguists, anthropologists, fieldworking linguists, and especially Oceanists and Austronesianists. Moreover, it provides important insights for researchers from other disciplines that are interested in the study of space.
Download or read book Levels of linguistic adaptation written by Jef Verschueren and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises the second part of selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, August 1987.
Download or read book Aspects of Automatic Text Analysis written by Alexander Mehler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-06-24 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents recent developments in automatic text analysis. Providing an overview of linguistic modeling, it collects contributions of authors from a multidisciplinary area that focus on the topic of automatic text analysis from different perspectives. It includes chapters on cognitive modeling and visual systems modeling, and contributes to the computational linguistic and information theoretical grounding of automatic text analysis.
Download or read book The Tuma Underworld of Love written by Gunter Senft and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his articles "Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands" and "Myth in Primitive Psychology" There he also presented the Trobrianders' belief that a "baloma" can be reborn; he claimed that Trobrianders are unaware of the father's role as genitor. This volume presents a critical review of Malinowski's ethnography of Trobriand eschatology - finally settling the "virgin birth" controversy. It also documents the ritualized and highly poetic "wosi milamala" - the harvest festival songs. They are sung in an archaic variety of Kilivila called "biga baloma" - the baloma language. Malinowski briefly refers to these songs but does not mention that they codify many aspects of Trobriand eschatology. The songs are still sung at specific occasions; however, they are now moribund. With these songs Trobriand eschatology will vanish.
Download or read book The Typology of Adjectival Predication written by Harrie Wetzer and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Numeral Classifiers written by Kasumi Yamamoto and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is about the numeral classifier system and the acquisition of Japanese classifiers by Japanese children. It consists of two parts. First, it provides a general typological characterization of numeral classifier phrases and discusses problems in determining what constitutes the nature of classifiers. It also discusses the semantic properties of numeral classifiers based on an analysis of four languages from four different language families. Second, it examines the acquisitions of Japanese numeral classifiers by Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on the development of comprehension. The importance of the study is that it reveals that young children have a much greater sensitivity to the conceptual underpinnings of the numeral classifier system than was previously considered to be the case. The research results also provide a converging source of evidence that young children often come to initially grasp the structure of the world in ways that are better understood in cognitive than perceptual terms. The implications will contribute to not only the area of language acquisition but also categorization and conceptual development.
Download or read book what do we really know about nominal classification systems written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Systems of Nominal Classification written by Gunter Senft and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-03 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major linguistic study of nominal classification systems across a variety of languages, first published in 2000.
Download or read book Classifiers written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.
Download or read book Person Reference in Interaction written by N. J. Enfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture.
