Download or read book Arabic Indefinites Interrogatives and Negators written by David Wilmsen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins and development of the Arabic grammatical marker š/šī, which is found in interrogatives, negators, and indefinite determiners over a broad dialect area that stretches from the southern Levant to North Africa and includes dialects of Yemen and Oman. David Wilmsen draws on data from old vernacular Arabic texts and from a variety of Arabic dialects, and shows that, contrary to much of the literature on the diachrony of this morpheme, š/šī does not derive from Arabic šay 'thing'. Instead, he argues that it dates back to a pre-Arabic stage of West Semitic and probably has its origins in a Semitic demonstrative pronoun. On this theory, Arabic šay could in fact derive from š/šī, and not vice versa. The book demonstrates the significance of the Arabic dialects in understanding the history of Arabic and the Semitic languages, and claims that modern Arabic dialects could not have developed from Classical Arabic. It will be of interest to historical linguists of all persuasions from graduate level upwards, particularly all those working on Arabic and other Semitic languages.
Download or read book Arabic Indefinites Interrogatives and Negators written by David William Wilmsen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins and development of the Arabic grammatical marker s/sī, which is found in interrogatives, negators, and indefinite determiners in many Arabic dialects. It argues that s/sī does not derive from Arabic say 'thing' but from a Semitic demonstrative pronoun.
Download or read book Multi locus Analysis of Arabic Negation written by Alqassas Ahmad Alqassas and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the micro-variation in the syntax of negation of Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic. By including new and recently published data that support key issues for the syntax of negation, the book challenges the standard parametric view that negation has a fixed parametrized position in syntactic structure. It particularly argues for a multi-locus analysis with syntactic, semantic, morphosyntactic and diachronic implications for the various structural positions. Thus accounting for numerous word order restrictions, semantic ambiguities and pragmatic interpretations without complicating narrow syntax with special operations, configurations or constraints.
Download or read book Arabic and contact induced change written by Stefano Manfredi and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.
Download or read book The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean written by Anne Breitbarth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.
Download or read book Arabic Historical Dialectology written by Clive Holes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.
Download or read book Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic written by Ambjörn Sjörs and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic Ambjörn Sjörs investigates the grammar of standard negation in a wide selection of Semitic languages. The bulk of the investigation consists of a detailed analysis of negative constructions and is based on a first-hand examination of the examples in context. The main issues that are investigated in the book relate to the historical change of the expression of verbal negation in Semitic and the reconstruction of the genealogical relationship of negative constructions. It shows how negation is constantly renewed from the reanalysis of emphatic negative constructions, and how structural asymmetries between negative constructions and the corresponding affirmative constructions arise from the linguistically conservative nature of negative vis-à-vis affirmative clauses.
Download or read book Buyurdum ki The Whole World of Ottomanica and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 919 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is dedicated to Claudia Römer and brings together 33 contributions spanning a period from the 15th to the 20th century and covering the wide range of topics with which the honouree is engaged. The volume is divided into six parts that present current research on language, literature, and style as well as newer approaches and perspectives in dealing with sources and terminologies. Aspects such as conquest, administration, and financing of provinces are found as well as problems of endowments and the circulation of goods in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Another main topic is dedicated to minorities and their role and situation in various provinces and cities of the Ottoman Empire, as represented by various sources. But also topics like conversion, morality and control are illuminated. Finally, the volume provides an insight into the late Ottoman and early republican period, in which some previously unpublished sources (such as travel letters, memoirs) are presented and (re)discussed. The book is not only aimed at scholars and students of the Ottoman Empire; the thematic range is also of interest to linguists, historians, and cultural historians.
Download or read book The Negative Existential Cycle written by Ljuba Veselinova and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991, William Croft suggested that negative existentials (typically lexical expressions that mean ‘not exist, not have’) are one possible source for negation markers and gave his hypothesis the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). It is a variationist model based on cross-linguistic data. For a good twenty years following its formulation, it was cited at face-value without ever having been tested by (historical)-comparative data. Over the last decade, Ljuba Veselinova has worked on testing the model in a comparative perspective, and this edited volume further expands on her work. The collection presented here features detailed studies of several language families such as Bantu, Chadic and Indo-European. A number of articles focus on the micro-variation and attested historical developments within smaller groups and clusters such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, and Nanaic. Finally, variation and historical developments in specific languages are discussed for Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Moksha-Mordvin (Uralic), Bashkir (Turkic), Kalmyk (Mongolic), three Pama-Nyungan languages, O’dam (Southern Uto-Aztecan) and Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia). The book is concluded by two chapters devoted to modeling cyclical processes in language change from different theoretical perspectives. Key notions discussed throughout the book include affirmative and negative existential constructions, the expansion of the latter into verbal negation, and subsequently from more specific to more general markers of negation. Nominalizations as well as the uses of negative existentials as standalone negative answers figure among the most frequent pathways whereby negative existentials evolve as general negation markers. The operation of the Negative Existential Cycle appears partly genealogically conditioned, as the cycle is found to iterate regularly within some families but never starts in others, as is the case in Bantu. In addition, other special negation markers such as nominal negators are found to undergo similar processes, i.e. they expand into the verbal domain and thereby develop into more general negation markers. The book provides rich information on a specific path of the evolution of negation, on cyclical processes in language change, and it show-cases the historical-comparative method in a modern setting.
Download or read book Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek written by Katerina Chatzopoulou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek. It draws on both quantitative data from texts dating from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, and Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from all stages of the language, from Homeric Greek to Standard Modern Greek. Katerina Chatzopoulou accounts for the contrast between the two complementary negators found in Greek, referred to as a NEG1 and NEG2, in terms of the latter's sensitivity to nonveridicality, and explains the asymmetry observed in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system. The volume also sets out a new interpretation of Jespersen's cycle, which abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological properties of the phenomenon and proposes instead that it is best understood in semantic terms. This approach not only explains the patterns observed in Greek, but also those found in other languages that deviate from the traditional description of Jespersen's cycle.
Download or read book Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics written by Jonathan Owens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.
Download or read book The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean written by David Willis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first of a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It examines the development of sentential negation and negative indefinites and quantifiers in languages and language groups such as Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic.
Download or read book Digital Orality written by Cecelia Cutler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume showcases innovative research on dialectal, vernacular, and other forms of “oral,” speech-like writing in digital spaces. The shift from a predominantly print culture to a digital culture is shaping people's identities and relationships to one another in important ways. Using examples from distinct international contexts and language varieties (kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English, and varieties of American English) the authors examine how people use unexpected codes, scripts, and spellings to say something about who they are or aspire to be. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the impact of social media on language use, style, and orthography, as well as those with a broader interest in literacy, communication, language contact, and language change.
Download or read book Cyclical Change Continued written by Elly van Gelderen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the typical stages and their stability, and the areal factors influencing cycles. The languages and language families that are considered in depth are Central Pomo, Cherokee, Chinese, English, French, Gbe, German, Hmong-Mien, Maipurean, Mayan, Mohawk, Mon-Khmer, Niger-Congo, Nupod, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai , Tuscarora, Ute, and Yoruboid. One paper covers several of the world’s language families. Cyclical change connects linguists working in various frameworks because it is exciting to find a reason behind this fascinating phenomenon.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact written by Salikoko Mufwene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 947 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - has been pervasive in human history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experiences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this, how does language contact work? With contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the first in a two-volume set - delves into this question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late 19th century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social interactions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the linguistic outcomes.
Download or read book Syntax Over Time written by Theresa Biberauer and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2015 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it. Converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component. In this volume, international scholars examine these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sami. They aim to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can 'microsyntactic' investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates ('cartography'), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints? The book will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change, and especially those who believe that historical linguistics and linguistic theory can, and should, inform one another.
Download or read book Dialect Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia Volume III Phonology Morphology Syntax Style written by Clive Holes and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is a three-volume study of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bahrain by its older generation in the mid 1970s, and the socio-cultural factors that produced them. The present Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style, is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest. Volume I: Glossary, published in 2001, lists all the dialectal vocabulary, with extensive contextual exemplification, and cross-referenced to other lexica, which occurred in the complete set of texts recorded during fieldwork. Volume II: Ethnographic Texts, published in 2005, presents a selection of these texts, transcribed, annotated and translated, and with detailed background essays, covering major aspects of the pre-oil culture of the Gulf and the initial stages of the transition to the modern era: pearl diving, agriculture, communal relations, marriage, childhood, domestic life, work. Excerpts from local dialect poems concerned with these subjects are also included.
