Download or read book The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia written by R.M.W. Dixon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R. M. W. Dixon, author of acclaimed grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages and Fijian, here describes the hauntingly complex structure of Jarawara, spoken by just 170 Indians. Professor Dixon shared their daily lives, deep in the Amazonian jungle, during seven field trips. He explains how their unusual language reflects their environment and their mental attitudes: for example, when someone describes something that has happened the grammar obliges that person to state whether or not he or she saw it happen. His account brings to life the culture of this tribe of slash-and-burn agriculturalists.
Download or read book The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia written by Robert M. W. Dixon and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.
Download or read book HANDBOOK AMAZONIAN LANGUAGES written by Desmond C. Derbyshire and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "HANDBOOK AMAZONIAN LANGUAGES".
Download or read book The Languages of the Amazon written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia, which include some of the most the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction. Alexandra Aikhenvald, one of the world's leading experts on the region, provides an account of the more than 300 languages. She sets out their main characteristics, compares their common and unique features, and describes the histories and cultures of the people who speak them. The languages abound in rare features. Most have been in contact with each other for many generations, giving rise to complex patterns of linguistic influence. The author draws on her own extensive field research to tease out and analyse the patterns of their genetic and structural diversity. She shows how these patterns reveal the interrelatedness of language and culture; different kinship systems, for example, have different linguistic correlates. Professor Aikhenvald explains the many unusual features of Amazonian languages, which include evidentials, tones, classifiers, and elaborate positional verbs. She ends the book with a glossary of terms, and a full guide for those readers interested in following up a particular language or linguistic phenomenon. The book is free of esoteric terminology, written in its author's characteristically clear style, and brought vividly to life with numerous accounts of her experience in the region. It may be used as a resource in courses in Latin American studies, Amazonian studies, linguistic typology, and general linguistics, and as reference for linguistic and anthropological research.
Download or read book The Amazonian Languages written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-23 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon Basin is arguably both one of the least-known and the most complex linguistic regions in the world. It is the home of some 300 languages belonging to around twenty language families, plus more than a dozen genetic isolates, and many of these languages (often incompletely documented and mostly endangered) show properties that constitute exceptions to received ideas about linguistic universals. This book provides an overview in a single volume of this rich and exciting linguistic area. The editors and contributors have sought to make their descriptions as clear and accessible as possible, in order to provide a basis for further research on the structural characteristics of Amazonian languages and their genetic and areal relationships, as well as a point of entry to important cross-linguistic data for the wider constituency of theoretical linguists.
Download or read book Essays on Language Function and Language Type written by Joan L. Bybee and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their subject matter and in their theoretical orientation all the papers in this volume reflect the powerful influence of T. Givón. Most of them deal with questions of morphosyntactic typology, pragmatics, and grammaticalization theory. Many of them are directly based on extensive fieldwork on local languages of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Others are based on statistical analyses of extensive written and spoken corpora of texts.
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 The Indigenous Languages of South America written by Lyle Campbell and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide is a thorough guide to the indigenous languages of this part of the world. With more than a third of the linguistic diversity of the world (in terms of language families and isolates), South American languages contribute new findings in most areas of linguistics. Though formerly one of the linguistically least known areas of the world, extensive descriptive and historical linguistic research in recent years has expanded knowledge greatly. These advances are represented in this volume in indepth treatments by the foremost scholars in the field, with chapters on the history of investigation, language classification, language endangerment, language contact, typology, phonology and phonetics, and on major language families and regions of South America.
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.
Download or read book Syntax Theory and Analysis Volume 3 written by Tibor Kiss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.
Download or read book Evidentiality written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-11-05 with total page 480 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 1661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
Download or read book Complementation written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the variety of types of complementation found across the languages of the world and their grammatical properties and meanings. It shows how languages differ in the grammatical properties of complement clauses and in the types of verbs which take them, and explores the complement strategies deployed by languages which lack a complement clause construction. The book includes detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German. These are framed by R. M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws together the evidence and the arguments.
Download or read book Adjective Classes written by R.M.W. Dixon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that every language has an adjective class and how such classes vary. Thirteen scholars report original research on languages from North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The book throws new light on the nature and classification of adjectives and redefines the cross-linguistic parameters of their variation.
Download or read book Embodiment in Cross Linguistic Studies written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first book publication which focuses on conceptualization and polysemy of ‘eye’. It encompasses a wide variety of languages to evidence cross linguistic similarities and differences in the semantic extensions of the eye.
Download or read book Morphological Perspectives written by Matthew Baerman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations.
