Download or read book Relative Clause Structure in Mesoamerican Languages written by Enrique L. Palancar and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As the first major survey of relative clause structure in the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, this volume comprises a collection of original, in-depth studies of relative constructions in representative languages from across Mexico and Central America, based on empirical data collected by the authors themselves. The studies not only reveal the complex and fascinating nature of relative clauses in the languages in question, but they also shed invaluable light on how Mesoamerica came to be one of the richest and most diverse linguistic areas on our planet. Contributors are: Eric Campbell, Claudine Chamoreau, Lucero Flores Nâajera, Silviano Jimâenez Jimâenez, âOscar Lâopez Nicolâas, Eladio (B'alam) Mateo Toledo, Enrique L. Palancar, and Roberto Zavala Maldonado"--
Download or read book Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages written by Associate Professor of Linguistics Ivano Caponigro and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of varieties of headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families, all Mesoamerican languages spoken in Mexico and Guatemala and one Chibchan language spoken in Honduras. Headless relative clauses are clauses that often resemble interrogative clauses or headed relative clauses in their morpho-syntactic shape, but whose meaning brings them close to nominal constructions. For the vastmajority of the languages in this volume, many of which are endangered and all of which are understudied, the work presented here represents the only published material on the subject.
Download or read book Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages written by Ivano Caponigro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise. These clauses have been even more neglected in the study of Mesoamerican languages. Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of the topic. Spanning fifteen languages from five language families, it is the broadest crosslinguistic study of headless relative clauses yet conducted. For most of these languages there is no previous descriptive or documentary material on wh-constructions in general, let alone headless relative clauses. Many of the languages are threatened or endangered; all are understudied. Each chapter in this volume constitutes an original contribution to typological and theoretical linguistics. The first chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the varieties of headless relative clauses and their importance to the study of human language, while the other chapters are language-specific and follow a uniform format to facilitate comparisons and generalizations across languages. Through the collective work of a team of twenty-one scholars, Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages presents a clear and systematic introduction to relative and interrogative clauses in Mesoamerican languages.
Download or read book Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas written by Bernard Comrie and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.
Download or read book Discourse Studies in Mesoamerican Languages written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian written by Virginia Hill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian. Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu examine the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns such as generalized subjunctive complementation on the one hand, and the Romance morphology that supplies complementizers and grammatical mood forms on the other. The consequences of this mixed typology range from root clauses with non-finite verbs to split heads and repeated recycling in clausal complements. The book argues that discourse triggers at the left periphery are responsible for fluctuations in verb movement in finite clauses, while with gerunds and imperatives verb movement follows from functional constraints. It further argues that clausal complements to control and raising verbs systematically display the pattern of the Balkan subjunctive, and that the spell out of these clausal complements has been repeatedly recycled during the development of Romanian. Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian presents a new perspective on the manifestation of Balkan Sprachbund properties in the language, and on the nature of parametric differences in relation to other Romance languages. It provides a unified explanation for a range of constructions that have previously been treated as separate phenomena, and places diachronic changes in Romanian in a wider context.
Download or read book Constituency and convergence in the Americas written by Adam J.R. Tallman and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2024-08-05 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together studies on morphosyntactic and phonological constituency from a host of languages across the Americas. The study expands on previous multivariate typological work on phonological domains by simultaneously coding the results of morphosyntactic constituency tests. The descriptions are geared towards developing a typology of constituency and linguistic levels in both morphosyntactic and phonological domains. The multivariate approach adopted in this volume deconstructs constituency tests and phonological domains into cross-linguistically comparable variables applying and extending autotypology method to the domain of constituent structure. Current methodologies for establishing constituents have been criticized for containing an in-built selection bias, where the results and interpretation of tests are chosen or sampled in such a fashion that specific analyses are prejudged to be correct or false in a non-rigorous fashion. The papers of this volume develop novel methodology for reporting and coding constituency variables for language description and comparison that seeks to reign in selection bias allowing theories concerning the relationship between morphosyntactic and phonological constituent structure to be more severely tested.
Download or read book The Mesoamerican Indian Languages written by Jorge A. Suarez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-04-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At least a hundred indigenous Indian languages are known to have been spoken in Mesoamerica, but it is only in the past fifty years that many of them have been adequately described. Professor Suárez draws together this considerable mass of scholarship in a general survey that will provide an invaluable source of reference.
Download or read book African linguistics on the prairie written by Jason Kandybowicz and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Linguistics on the Prairie features select revised peer-reviewed papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Kansas. The articles in this volume reflect the enormous diversity of African languages, as they focus on languages from all of the major African language phyla. The articles here also reflect the many different research perspectives that frame the work of linguists in the Association for Contemporary African Linguistics. The diversity of views presented in this volume are thus indicative of the vitality of current African linguistics research. The work presented in this volume represents both descriptive and theoretical methodologies and covers fields ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphology, typology, syntax, and semantics to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, computational linguistics and beyond. This broad scope and the quality of the articles contained within holds out the promise of continued advancement in linguistic research on African languages.
Download or read book The Structure of Language written by Emma L. Pavey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the time we communicate using language without considering the complex activity we are undertaking, forming words and sentences in a split second. This book introduces the analysis of language structure, combining both description and theory within a single, practical text. It begins by examining words and parts of words, and then looks at how words work together to form sentences that communicate meaning. Sentence patterns across languages are also studied, looking at the similarities and the differences we find in how languages communicate meaning. The book also discusses how context can affect how we structure our sentences: the context of a particular language and its structures, the context of old and new information for us and our addressee(s), and the context of our culture.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Complex Sentences written by Holger Diessel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-02 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.
Download or read book The Handbook of Language Emergence written by Brian MacWhinney and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm. Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever
Download or read book Interactions of Degree and Quantification written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interactions of Degree and Quantification examines connections and semantic parallels between individual and degree quantifiers in the expression of quantity and measurement in human language.
Download or read book A grammar of Yakkha written by Diana Schackow and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This grammar provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Yakkha, a Sino-Tibetan language of the Kiranti branch. Yakkha is spoken by about 14,000 speakers in eastern Nepal, in the Sankhuwa Sabha and Dhankuta districts. The grammar is based on original fieldwork in the Yakkha community. Its primary source of data is a corpus of 13,000 clauses from narratives and naturally-occurring social interaction which the author recorded and transcribed between 2009 and 2012. Corpus analyses were complemented by targeted elicitation. The grammar is written in a functional-typological framework. It focusses on morphosyntactic and semantic issues, as these present highly complex and comparatively under-researched fields in Kiranti languages. The sequence of the chapters follows the well-established order of phonological, morphological, syntactic and discourse-structural descriptions. These are supplemented by a historical and sociolinguistic introduction as well as an analysis of the complex kinship terminology. Topics such as verbal person marking, argument structure, transitivity, complex predication, grammatical relations, clause linkage, nominalization, and the topography-based orientation system have received in-depth treatment. Wherever possible, the structures found were explained in a historical-comparative perspective in order to shed more light on how their particular properties have emerged.
Download or read book Heritage Languages and Their Speakers written by Maria Polinsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering study of heritage languages, from a leading scholar in this area of study world-wide.
Download or read book The Grammar of Time Reference in Yukatek Maya written by Jürgen Bohnemeyer and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Non Interrogative Subordinate Wh Clauses written by Łukasz Jędrzejowski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines subordinate wh-clauses that lack an interrogative interpretation, particularly those in which the wh-word seems to deviate from its literal meaning. These include subordinate manner wh-clauses that have a declarative-like meaning, locative wh-clauses expressing kinds, and headed relatives that serve as recognitional cues, among many others. While regular interrogative embedding has been widely studied in recent years, little is known about the circumstances under which non-interrogative (subordinate) wh-clauses are licensed, nor why some, but not all, wh-phrases can be polyfunctional. The chapters in the book combine the study of cross-linguistic variation in patterns of subordination with formal semantic and syntactic analyses, with data drawn from a wide range of languages including Basque, Czech, English, Mandarin, Romanian, and Taiwan Southern Min. They provide novel insights into the ways in which wh-phrases can be used to introduce complements, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses, and show how the meanings associated with wh-words are exploited beyond their standard distribution. The findings have implications for our understanding of both the phenomenon of subordination as a whole and the relationship between form and meaning in wh-clauses.
