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 Words and the Mind written by Barbara Malt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of word meanings promises important insights into the nature of the human mind by revealing what people find to be most cognitively significant in their experience. However, as we learn more about the semantics of various languages, we are faced with an interesting problem. Different languages seem to be telling us different stories about the mind. For example, important distinctions made in one language are not necessarily made in others. What are we to make of these cross-linguistic differences? How do they arise? Are they created by purely linguistic processes operating over the course of language evolution? Or do they reflect fundamental differences in thought? In this sea of differences, are there any semantic universals? Which categories might be given by the genes, which by culture, and which by language? And what might the cross-linguistic similarities and differences contribute to our understanding of conceptual and linguistic development? The kinds of mapping principles, structures, and processes that link language and non-linguistic knowledge must accommodate not just one language but the rich diversity that has been uncovered. The integration of knowledge and methodologies necessary for real progress in answering these questions has happened only recently, as experimental approaches have been applied to the cross-linguistic study of word meaning. In Words and the Mind, Barbara Malt and Phillip Wolff present evidence from the leading researchers who are carrying out this empirical work on topics as diverse as spatial relations, events, emotion terms, motion events, objects, body-part terms, causation, color categories, and relational categories. By bringing them together, Malt and Wolff highlight some of the most exciting cross-linguistic and cross-cultural work on the language-thought interface, from a broad array of fields including linguistics, anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology. Their results provide some answers to these questions and new perspectives on the issues surrounding them.

Download or read book The Mayan Languages written by Judith Aissen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.

Download or read book Experiential Constructions in Yucatec Maya written by Elisabeth Verhoeven and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines a fieldwork-based language-specific analysis with a typological investigation. It offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the form and semantics of experiencer constructions in Yucatec, the Mayan language of the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. Since the linguistic expression of experience is not restricted to a specific grammatical area the study touches a great variety of grammatical fields in the language such as argument structure, grammatical relations, possessive constructions, subordinate constructions, etc. The empirical analysis of the Yucatec data is preceded by a thorough examination of the functional domain and the cross-linguistic coding of experience which until now could not be found in the literature. This study will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of typology and Native American linguistics, and especially to those interested in argument structure and the syntax-semantics interface.

Download or read book The Expression of Time written by Wolfgang Klein and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is the most fundamental category of human cognition and action, and all human languages have developed many devices to express it. These include verbal categories, such as tense and aspect, but also adverbials, particles, and principles of discourse organisation. This book is intended as a tutorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through a number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics written by Anne Barron and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections: Methods and modalities Established fields Pragmatics across disciplines Applications of pragmatic research in today’s world. With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.

Download or read book Aspectuality and Temporality written by Zlatka Guentchéva and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, English, Norwegian, Hindi), Hamito-Semitic (Berber, Zenaga Berber, Arabic varieties, Neo-Aramaic), African (Wolof, Langi), Asian (Badaga, Korean, Mongolian languages – Khalkha, Buriat, Kalmuck – Thaï, Tibetic languages), Amerindian (Yucatec Maya, Sikuani), Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics, especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality, on pragmatics, on areal linguistics and on typology.

Download or read book Free Variation in Grammar written by Kristin Kopf and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.

Download or read book Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure written by Melissa Bowerman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2008 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on argument structure and its role in language acquisition. The volume is the outcome of an integrated research project and comprises chapters by both specialists in first language acquisition and field linguists working on a variety of lesser-known languages. Drawing on a broad range of crosslinguistic data, Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure integrates important contemporary issues in linguistics and language acquisition.

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 2012-09-20 with total page 323 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 Form and Function in Language Research written by Johannes Helmbrecht and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-09-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects. This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address fundamental issues in the study of language, such as the nature of linguistic categories, the constitution of functional domains, and the form of cross-linguistic continua. Empirical data from individual languages and from typological samples are investigated in order to achieve generalizations about the properties of human grammar(s). Several grammatical phenomena are dealt with including tonal systems, person distinctions, modalities, reciprocity, complex predicates, grammatical relations, word order, clause linkage, and information structure. The structure of the book illustrates the fundamental importance of the analytical distinction between the onomasiological and the semasiological approach to language and language diversity. Both perspectives are integrated in most papers with a dominant focus on either the former or the latter perspective.

Download or read book Parts of Speech written by Umberto Ansaldo and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets. These articles were originally published in Studies in Language 32:3 (2008).

Download or read book New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics written by Heriberto Avelino and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics is a collection of papers synthesizing the research on Mayan languages at the beginning of the 21st century. One of the most prominent features of the articles included in this book is the balance between the use of the most recent linguistic theories and the empirical data from which analyses are drawn. A definitive characteristic of the book is that all of the papers provide rich and new descriptive material gathered in the field by their respective authors. The findings reported in this book have implications for a deeper understanding not only of particular aspects of the individual grammars of the Mayan family, but might have consequences for linguistic theory as well as for typological and universal generalizations. The volume brings together linguists of diverse areas of specialization phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, epigraphy, lexicography and anthropological linguistics to discuss recent analyses and data from a variety of Mayan languages. For its broad scope summarizing the recent methodologies, theoretical models and findings of research in Mayan languages, the volume is of particular interest to the academic community at large, including researchers, teachers and students alike.

Download or read book Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas written by José Camacho and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-07-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The reader finds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics written by Keith Allan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 967 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

Download or read book Grammaticalization and Variation written by Nicole Hober and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Studia typologica' ist der Titel der Beihefte zur Zeitschrift 'Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung/Language Typology and Universals (STUF)'. In den 'Studia typologica' werden Beiträge veröffentlicht, die vielversprechende neue Themen im Bereich der allgemein-vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft ansprechen. Insbesondere empirisch gut fundierte Beiträge mit crosslinguistischer Orientierung, die neue Problemstellungen auf innovative Art präsentieren, sind in den 'Studia typologica' willkommen. Die Beiheftereihe unterstützt nachdrücklich Studien zu weniger gut erforschten Sprachen und/oder Phänomenen. Von großem Interesse für die 'Studia typologica' sind auch areal-typologische Arbeiten sowie Beiträge, die sich dem Zusammenspiel von Sprachkontakt und Sprachtypologie widmen. Die 'Studia typologica' sind theorie- und modellübergreifend als Forum für typologisch ausgerichtete Forschungsarbeiten gedacht. Die Beihefte umfassen sowohl Monographien als auch thematisch homogene Sammelbände. Alle eingehenden Manuskripte werden begutachtet (double blind). Die Publikationssprache ist Englisch.

Download or read book Introducing Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.