Download or read book Lexical Categories and Root Classes in Amerindian Languages written by Ximena Lois and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of lexical categories and root class determination is fundamental in linguistic description and theory. Research on this topic has been particularly stimulated by studies of Amerindian languages. The essays in this collection, written by specialists in languages from South, Middle and North America, provide new insights into processes, levels, functions, and the aquisition of lexical categories, from various recent theoretical perspectives. The volume also addresses recent debates about root indeterminacy. Focusing on morphosyntax, phonology, and semantics, the contributions offer invaluable material for typological generalizations and for comprehension of the nature of the mental lexicon.

Download or read book Lexical Polycategoriality written by Valentina Vapnarsky and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes written by Eva van Lier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-07 with total page 1137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes across a wide range of contemporary linguistic theories, such as Cognitive Grammar, Minimalist Syntax, and Lexical Functional Grammar, while the focus of Part III is on individual word classes, from major categories such as verb and noun to minor ones such as adpositions and ideophones. Part IV provides a number of cross-linguistic case studies, exploring word classes in families including Afroasiatic, Sinitic, Mayan, Austronesian, and in sign languages. Chapters in the final part of the book discuss word classes from the perspective of various sub-disciplines of linguistics, ranging from first and second language acquisition to computational and corpus linguistics. Together, the contributions showcase the importance of word classes for the whole discipline of linguistics, while also highlighting the many ongoing debates in the areas and outlining fruitful avenues for future research.

Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America written by Carmen Dagostino and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

Download or read book All Things Morphology written by Sedigheh Moradi and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology. The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

Download or read book The Mayan Languages written by Judith Aissen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.

Download or read book Language Contact and Documentation Contacto ling stico y documentaci n written by Bernard Comrie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume is highly relevant to the current regional and international discussion on endangered languages, language contact, documentation and areal typology. The publication is the outcome of a fruitful theoretical and methodological exchange between Latin American scholars and international scholars working in other regions. Most of the papers target Latin American languages. Additionally, new insight into the contact situations in Indonesia, Iran, Australia and Papua New Guinea is provided.

Download or read book Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas written by Mark Waltermire and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas focuses on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guaraní, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. This edited volume explores the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, and also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure. Across ten chapters, this book offers a broad survey of bidirectional influence in Spanish contact situations both geographically (in the US Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Andean regions of Ecuador and Peru, and the Southern Cone) and structurally (in the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics). By examining the potential structural effects that two languages have on one another, it provides a novel and more holistic perspective on mutual linguistic influence than that of previous work on language contact. The volume serves as a reference on mutual influence in bilingual language varieties and will be of interest to researchers, scholars and graduate students in Hispanic linguistics, and more broadly in language contact.

Download or read book Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas written by José Camacho and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-07-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The reader finds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).

Download or read book Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics written by Catherine Rudin and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Siouan family comprises some twenty languages, historically spoken across a broad swath of the central North American plains and woodlands, as well as in parts of the southeastern United States. In spite of its geographical extent and diversity, and the size and importance of several Siouan-speaking tribes, this family has received relatively little attention in the linguistic literature and many of the individual Siouan languages are severely understudied. This volume aims to make work on Siouan languages more broadly available and to encourage deeper investigation of the myriad typological, theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogical issues they raise. The 17 chapters in this volume present a broad range of current Siouan research, focusing on various Siouan languages, from a variety of linguistic perspectives: historical-genetic, philological, applied, descriptive, formal/generative, and comparative/typological. The editors' preface summarizes characteristic features of the Siouan family, including head-final and "verb-centered" syntax, a complex system of verbal affixes including applicatives and subject-possessives, head-internal relative clauses, gendered speech markers, stop-systems including ejectives, and a preference for certain prosodic and phonotactic patterns. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Robert L. Rankin, a towering figure in Siouan linguistics throughout his long career, who passed away in February of 2014.

Download or read book Aspects of Split Ergativity written by Jessica Coon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspects of Split Ergativity argues that aspect-based split ergativity does not mark a split in how Case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. The contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language-namely, the nonperfective aspects-involve an intransitive aspectual matrix verb and a subordinated lexical verb.

Download or read book Ergativity in Amazonia written by Spike Gildea and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a typological/theoretical introduction plus eight papers about ergative alignment in 16 Amazonian languages. All are written by linguists with years of fieldwork and comparative experience in the region, all describe details of the synchronic systems, and several also provide diachronic insight into the evolution of these systems. The five papers in Part I focus on languages from four larger families with ergative patterns primarily in morphology. The typological contribution is in detailed consideration of unusual splits, changes in ergative patterns, and parallels between ergative main clauses and nominalizations. The three papers in Part II discuss genetically isolated languages. Two present dominant ergative patterns in both morphology and syntax, the other a syntactic inverse system that is predominantly ergative in discourse. In each, the authors demonstrate that identification of traditional grammatical relations is problematic. These data will figure in all future typological and theoretical debates about grammatical relations.

Download or read book Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas written by Olivier Le Guen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to bring together researchers studying a range of different types of emerging sign languages in the Americas, and their relationship to the gestures produced in the surrounding communities of hearing individuals. Contents Acknowledgements Olivier Le Guen, Marie Coppola and Josefina Safar Introduction: How Emerging Sign Languages in the Americas contributes to the study of linguistics and (emerging) sign languages Part I: Emerging sign languages of the Americas. Descriptions and analysis John Haviland Signs, interaction, coordination, and gaze: interactive foundations of “Z”—an emerging (sign) language from Chiapas, Mexico Laura Horton Representational strategies in shared homesign systems from Nebaj, Guatemala Josefina Safar and Rodrigo Petatillo Chan Strategies of noun-verb distinction in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages Emmanuella Martinod, Brigitte Garcia and Ivani Fusellier A typological perspective on the meaningful handshapes in the emerging sign languages on Marajó Island (Brazil) Ben Braithwaite Emerging sign languages in the Caribbean Olivier Le Guen, Rebeca Petatillo and Rita (Rossy) Kinil Canché Yucatec Maya multimodal interaction as the basis for Yucatec Maya Sign Language Marie Coppola Gestures, homesign, sign language: Cultural and social factors driving lexical conventionalization Part II: Sociolinguistic sketches John B. Haviland Zinacantec family homesign (or “Z”) Laura Horton A sociolinguistic sketch of deaf individuals and families from Nebaj, Guatemala Josefina Safar and Olivier Le Guen Yucatec Maya Sign Language(s): A sociolinguistic overview Emmanuella Martinod, Brigitte Garcia and Ivani Fusellier Sign Languages on Marajó Island (Brazil) Ben Braithwaite Sociolinguistic sketch of Providence Island Sign Language Kristian Ali and Ben Braithwaite Bay Islands Sign Language: A Sociolinguistic Sketch Marie Coppola Sociolinguistic sketch: Nicaraguan Sign Language and Homesign Systems in Nicaragua

Download or read book Semantics and Morphology of Early Adjectives in First Language Acquisition written by Sabrina Noccetti and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-18 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about how toddlers learn their first adjectives, such as, for example, red, big and tasty. Adjectives denote properties and enter child vocabularies later than words for objects (such as apple and tree) and actions (such as eat and run), probably due to lower frequencies in parental speech and greater conceptual complexity. Adjective acquisition has received relatively little attention in child language research. Furthermore, cross-linguistic studies of adjective learning are virtually non-existent. This book represents the first systematic analysis of how children learning typologically different languages acquire adjective form, function and meaning. The cross-linguistic comparisons undertaken in the book provide valuable insights into universal and language-specific aspects of language acquisition. For each of the languages studied in this volume, the development of adjective semantics is studied in tandem with the development of morphology by testing two hypotheses: (a) the acquisition trajectory in the domain of adjectival morphology is determined by the typological properties of the target language; (b) irrespective of the languages being acquired, adjective learning is facilitated by universal conceptual mechanisms such as comparison and contrast.

Download or read book The Linguistics of Temperature written by Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume is the first comprehensive typological study of the conceptualisation of temperature in languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms (hot, cold, to freeze, etc.). The key issues addressed here include questions such as how languages categorize the temperature domain and what other uses the temperature expressions may have, e.g., when metaphorically referring to emotions (‘warm words’). The volume contains studies of more than 50 genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages and is unique in considering cross-linguistic patterns defined both by lexical and grammatical information. The detailed descriptions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic facts will serve as an important step in teasing apart the role of the different factors in how we speak about temperature – neurophysiology, cognition, environment, social-cultural practices, genetic relations among languages, and linguistic contact. The book is a significant contribution to semantic typology, and will be of interest for linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers.

Download or read book Nominal anchoring written by Kata Balogh and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are: (1) How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? (2) Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? (3) If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default? (4) What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness? (5) Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those found in languages without articles? Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific, the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g., familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity. In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.

Download or read book Distance in Language written by Anastasia Meermann and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conceptual metaphor of ""distance"" plays a crucial role in current perceptions of the world and humans' various interactions within it. It hardly seems possible to conceptualize space and time, emotional involvement in events, and relationships with other people in terms other than ""distance"". As a consequence, this primarily spatial concept figures prominently in the verbal expression of these abstract notions, and is thus highly relevant for the analysis of linguistic phenomena. In recen ...