Download or read book Noun Classification in Lower Grand Valley Dani written by Fonny Laupada Alomau and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of Lower Grand Valley Dani written by H. Myron Bromley and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of Lower Grand Valley Dani written by H. Myron Bromley and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area written by Bill Palmer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 1036 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.
Download or read book The Syntax Morphology Interface written by Matthew Baerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages.
Download or read book The World Atlas of Language Structures written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description ofthe structural feature in question.The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages.The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to bewithout it.
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 1398 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 Deconstructing Ergativity written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.
Download or read book The Papuan Languages of New Guinea written by William A. Foley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-11-20 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea provide an accessible account of one of the richest and most diverse linguistic situations in the world. The Papuan languages number over 700 (or 20 per cent of the world's total) in more than sixty language families. Less than a quarter of the individual languages have yet been adequately documented, and in this sense William Foley's book might be considered premature. However, in the search for language universals and generalisations in linguistic typology, it would be foolhardy to neglect the information that is available. In this respect alone, the present volume, systematically organised on mainly typology principles, is particularly timely and useful. In addition, the processes of linguistic diffusion are present in New Guinea to an extent probably paralleled elsewhere on the globe. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea will be of interest not only to general and comparative linguists and to typologists, but also to sociolinguists and anthropologists for the information it provides on the social dynamics of language content.
Download or read book Grammaticalization Scenarios from Africa the Americas and the Pacific written by Walter Bisang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.
Download or read book A Grammar of Western Dani written by Peter Barclay and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Phonology of Lower Grand Valley Dani written by H. Myron Bromley and published by Springer. This book was released on 1961 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Applicative Constructions in the World s Languages written by Fernando Zuniga and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 1297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).
Download or read book I saka written by Mark Donohue and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pronouns written by D. N. Shankara Bhat and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the basis of a cross-linguistic study of over 250 languages, this book brings to light several fascinating characteristics of pronouns. It argues that these words do not form a single category, but rather two different categories called 'personal pronouns' and 'proforms'. It points outseveral differences between the two, such as the occurrence of a dual structure among proforms but not among personal pronouns. These differences are shown to derive from the distinct functions that the two categories have to perform in language.The book also shows that the so-called interrogative pronouns of familiar languages do not actually have interrogation as their meaning. One can only assign the meaning of indefiniteness to them. Further, the notion of indefiniteness that can be associated with these and other pronouns is quitedifferent from the one that can be associated with noun phrases. Other interesting aspects of this book include the postulation of certain typological distinctions like 'two-person' and 'three-person' languages and 'free-pronoun' and 'bound-pronoun' languages.
Download or read book Pacific Linguistics written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of Abui written by František Kratochvíl and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work contains the first comprehensive description of Abui, a language of the Trans New Guinea family spoken approximately by 16,000 speakers in the central part of the Alor Island in Eastern Indonesia. The description focuses on the northern dialect of Abui as spoken in the village Takalelang. This study is based on primary data collected by the author on Alor. With Pantar island, Alor Island is the western-most area where Papuan languages are spoken. Abui syntax is characterized by rigid head-final word order. The language presents a number of typologically interesting features such as semantic alignment. Characteristic for Abui is the extensive use of generic verbs. Generic verbs appear as parts of complex verbs or in serial verb constructions. This grammar covers the phonology, morphology and basic syntax of Abui. The appendix contains several Abui texts and word lists. Not being written against any particular theoretical background, this book is of interest to scholars of both Papuan and Austronesian languages, as well as linguistic typology.