Download or read book A Grammar of Unua written by Elizabeth Pearce and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents a description of Unua, one of two dialects of Unua-Pangkumu, an Oceanic language of Malakula Island, Vanuatu. Unua has about 700 speakers who are bilinguals using Unua in local interactions and using the national language, Bislama, non-locally, as well as in local public and religious settings. The description is based on material collected in the field from speakers of different age-groups in the five Unua villages. The data corpus includes a substantial body of material: contemporary translations of the New Testament gospels; audio-recorded transcribed and glossed texts; and elicited material collected with a range of speakers. The analysis includes comparisons with other Malakula languages and is both of typological and historical-comparative interest. The data documentation is substantial and detailed.
Download or read book A grammar of Yauyos Quechua written by Aviva Shimelman and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a synchronic grammar of the southern dialects of Yauyos, an extremely endangered Quechuan language spoken in the Peruvian Andes. As the language is highly synthetic, the grammar focuses principally on morphology; a longer section is dedicated to the language's unusual evidential system. The grammar's 1400 examples are drawn from a 24-hour corpus of transcribed recordings collected in the course of the documentation of the language.
Download or read book A Grammar of Urarina written by Knut J. Olawsky and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urarina is an endangered isolate spoken by less than 3,000 people in the rainforests of North-western Peru. This book aims at providing a comprehensive description of Urarina grammar covering all areas of the language. From a linguistic point of view, Urarina is particularly interesting because of a range of unusual grammatical characteristics that are rarely or not at all found in other languages. One remarkable property is the constituent order OVA/VS, which was classified as "non-existing" by Greenberg (1966). However, this atypical syntactic structure is a surprisingly consistent feature of Urarina, which discerns it from the majority of languages which are assumed to follow this syntactic pattern. Another feature probably unique to Urarina is the existence of a three-way distinction for person marking on all verbs. The choice of the respective paradigm depends on a complex set of syntactic and pragmatic conditions, which are investigated in detail. Scholars whose main interest is in morphology will also be intrigued by the polysynthetic verbal morphology of Urarina, which fits well into the Amazonian context. A Grammar of Urarina is based on the framework of basic linguistic theory, which will be accessible to scholars from a wide range of backgrounds. The straightforward presentation of linguistic structures is accompanied by in-depth discussion of the most interesting and unusual features, illustrated by examples for all grammatical phenomena and often summarised by tables or diagrams. This book fills a gap not only for studies in Amazonian languages but also from a typological perspective.
Download or read book A Grammar of Y l Dnye written by Stephen C. Levinson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic ‘rara’ suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: "This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities." Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara
Download or read book Dr Esperanto s International Language written by Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Grammar of Cupe o written by Jane H. Hill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-12 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the most thorough studies ever prepared of a California language, Hill’s grammar reviews the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse features of Cupeño, a Uto-Aztecan (takic) language of California. Cupeño exhibits many unusual typological features, including split ergativity, that require linguists to revise our understanding of the development of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages in historical and areal perspective.
Download or read book A Grammar of Dazaga written by Josiah Walters and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Grammar of Dazaga, Josiah Walters provides a detailed description of Dazaga, a Saharan language. Based on recent data, the author describes the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Dazaga, relating his findings to related languages and recent typological studies.
Download or read book A Grammar of Hup written by Patience Epps and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 1009 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.
Download or read book A Grammar of Tariana from Northwest Amazonia written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.
Download or read book A Grammar of Nese written by Lana Grelyn Takau and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nese is a dying Oceanic language spoken on the island of Malekula, in northern Vanuatu. This book, based on first-hand fieldwork data, and without adhering to any particular syntactic framework, presents a synchronic grammatical description of Nese’s phonology and syntax. Despite being on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 20 living speakers, the language displays intriguing properties—including but not exclusive to the cross-linguistically rare apicolabial phonemes, interesting vowel-raising patterns in some word classes, and a discontinuous negation relationship that is obligatorily expressed with the irrealis mood marker. This book will probably be the last work published on Nese.
Download or read book A Grammar of Cavine a written by Antoine Guillaume and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 937 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a detailed high-quality descriptive grammar of the endangered Cavineña language (less than 1200 speakers), spoken in the Amazonian rainforest of Lowland Bolivia, an area where the indigenous languages are virtually unknown. Cavineña belongs to the Tacanan family, comprising five languages, none of which has been the subject of an adequate descriptive grammar. The grammar is based mostly on the extensive fieldwork conducted by the author in traditional Cavineña communities. Cast in the functional-typological framework, and based on natural discourse data, the grammar presents a detailed and copiously exemplified account of most aspects of the language, building up from basic levels (phonetic and phonological) to higher levels (morphological and syntactic), and from brief descriptions of each level to a more comprehensive description of the same level in specific chapters. The language contains a number of unusual features that will be of interest to typologist linguists, such as an unusual pitch accent system, a morpho-phonological rule that deletes case markers, an intricate predicate structure, a system of verbal suffixes coding associated motion, a specific causative of involvement marker, a peculiar prefix e- that attaches to nouns coding body parts and a complex system of second position clitic pronouns. The grammar will also be of interest to historical-comparative linguists, as for the first time one has sufficiently detailed grammatical information to make possible a reliable comparison with other languages with which Tacanan languages might be related, in particular the Panoan family, and to serve as input into hypotheses regarding the population history of this part of South America.
Download or read book The Grammar of Graphics written by Leland Wilkinson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for statisticians, computer scientists, geographers, research and applied scientists, and others interested in visualizing data, this book presents a unique foundation for producing almost every quantitative graphic found in scientific journals, newspapers, statistical packages, and data visualization systems. It was designed for a distributed computing environment, with special attention given to conserving computer code and system resources. While the tangible result of this work is a Java production graphics library, the text focuses on the deep structures involved in producing quantitative graphics from data. It investigates the rules that underlie pie charts, bar charts, scatterplots, function plots, maps, mosaics, and radar charts. These rules are abstracted from the work of Bertin, Cleveland, Kosslyn, MacEachren, Pinker, Tufte, Tukey, Tobler, and other theorists of quantitative graphics.
Download or read book A Grammar of the Kolokuma Dialect of j written by Kay Williamson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1969 monograph is a descriptive grammar of a dialect of Ịjọor (Ijaw), a language spoken in the Niger Delta area of Southern Nigeria. The dialect described, Kolokuma, is quite widely understood. The most interesting features of the language, on which the monograph concentrates, are its syntax and tonal system.
Download or read book A Grammar of Ma di written by Mairi Blackings and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-22 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This grammar provides one of the most detailed accounts available of the syntax of a Nilo-Saharan language. It fully describes some of the unusual characteristics of Ma'di, including the different word orders associated with different tenses, the particle-based modal and focus systems, the full range of adverbials, and the structure and meaning of the noun phrase. The grammar also describes the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and aspects of the lexicon of the language.
Download or read book A Grammar of Mongsen Ao written by A.R. Coupe and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author’s fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The languages of this region remain under-documented for a number of historical reasons. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the widespread cultural practice of head-hunting discouraged outsiders from entering the Naga Hills. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, an armed rebellion by Naga separatists and a government policy of restricting access to the troubled area ensured that Nagaland remained a difficult place to conduct research. In this context, A Grammar of Mongsen Ao offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory. This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.
Download or read book A Grammar of Udihe written by Irina Nikolaeva and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 1008 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. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
Download or read book A Grammar of Neverver written by Julie Barbour and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neverver is an Oceanic language spoken by just over 500 people on the high island of Malekula in Vanuatu. Drawing on an extensive corpus of field recordings collected between 2004 and 2008, the analysis reveals a very interesting phonological system with six prenasalized segments, rich systems of possession, tense/aspect/mood marking, valence change, and verb serialization. The grammar is of interest to specialists in Oceanic and Austronesian linguistics, as well as to general linguists, especially those interested in linguistic typology.
