Download or read book Maricopa Morphology and Syntax written by Lynn Gordon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Case and Grammatical Relations written by Greville G. Corbett and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.
Download or read book Studies in African Linguistic Typology written by F. K. Erhard Voeltz and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-03-22 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-one papers that make up this volume reflect the broad perspective of African linguistic typology studies today. Where previous volumes would present language material from a very restricted area and perspective, the present contributions reflect the global interest and orientation of current African linguistic studies. The studies are nearly all implicational in nature. Based upon a detailed survey of a particular linguistic phenomenon in a given language or language area conclusions are drawn about the general nature about this phenomenon in the languages of Africa and beyond. They represent as such a first step that may ultimately lead to a more thorough understanding of African linguistic structures. This approach is well justified. Taking the other road, attempting to pick out linguistic details from often fairly superficially documented languages runs the risk that the data and its implications for the structure investigated might be misunderstood. Consequentially only very few studies of this nature giving the very broad perspective, the overview of a particular structure type covering the whole African continent are represented here.
Download or read book Person written by Anna Siewierska and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook deals with the grammatical category of person, which covers the first person, the second person, and the third person. Drawing on data from over 700 languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different languages, and examines the factors underlying this variation. She shows how person forms vary in substance, in the nature of the semantic distinctions they convey, in how they are used in sentences and discourse, and in the way they function to convey social distinctions. By looking at different types of person forms in the grammatical and social contexts in which they are used, this book documents an underlying unity between them, arguing against the treatment of person markers based on arbitrary sets of morphological and syntactic properties. Clearly organized and accessibly written, it will be welcomed by students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those interested in grammatical categories and their use.
Download or read book Linguistic Fieldwork written by Paul Newman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Topics include the linguist's attitude, the work session and the roles of native speakers.
Download or read book Case written by Mark Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a unified theory of structural case and applies it to data from more than twenty unrelated languages.
Download or read book Scales and Hierarchies written by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume advances our understanding of the role of scales and hierarchies across the linguistic sciences. Although scales and hierarchies are widely assumed to play a role in the modelling of linguistic phenomena, their status remains controversial, and it is these controversies that the present volume tackles head-on.
Download or read book The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking written by Michael Cysouw and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking. Equipped with a new definition, a typology of the paradigmatic structure of person marking is presented, incorporating data from around 400 languages. Nothing appears to be impossible for the paradigmatic structure, although some patterns are clearly more probable than others are. Starting from the more commonly occurring patterns, the diachronic dynamics of paradigmatic structure are investigated by comparing close relatives that differ slightly in the structure of their person paradigms.
Download or read book A Natural History of Infixation written by Alan C. L. Yu and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-07-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like "im-bloody-possible", and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: Professor Yu explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics, considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. He examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. He compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation. Alan Yu's pioneering study will interest phonologists and morphologists of all theoretical persuasions, as well as typologists and historical linguists.
Download or read book Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable written by Geoffrey Sampson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book challenges the idea that languages are equally complex. Eighteen scholars look at evidence from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and change and social complexity. Their conclusions challenge conventional ideas about the nature of language and contemporary theory.
Download or read book Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 1 written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a new and fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In three clearly written and accessible volumes, he describes how best to go about doing linguistics, the most satisfactory and profitable ways to work, and the pitfalls to avoid. In the first volume he addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages. He argues that grammatical structures and rules should be worked out inductively on the basis of evidence, explaining in detail the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can build up from observed utterances. He shows how the grammars and words of one language may be compared to others of the same or different families, explains the methods involved in cross-linguistic parametric analyses, and describes how to interpret the results. Volume 2 and volume 3 (to be published in 2011) offer in-depth tours of underlying principles of grammatical organization, as well as many of the facts of grammatical variation. 'The task of the linguist,' Professor Dixon writes, 'is to explain the nature of human languages - each viewed as an integrated system - together with an explanation of why each language is the way it is, allied to the further scientific pursuits of prediction and evaluation.' Basic Linguistic Theory is the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's thinking about every aspect and manifestation of language and immersion in linguistic fieldwork. It is a one-stop text for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, as well as for those in neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology.
Download or read book Language Complexity written by Matti Miestamo and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-06 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume – a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 – is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis written by Michael Fortescue and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 1089 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 The polyfunctionality of still expressions written by Bastian Persohn and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This volume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammarians alike.
Download or read book World Lexicon of Grammaticalization written by Tania Kouteva and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on analysis of more than 1,000 languages, this volume reconstructs more than 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world.
Download or read book Describing Morphosyntax written by Thomas E. Payne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.
Download or read book Evidentiality written by Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists.
