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Focus Strategies In African Languages
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Book Synopsis Focus Strategies in African Languages by : Enoch Oladé Aboh
Download or read book Focus Strategies in African Languages written by Enoch Oladé Aboh and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies in African Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus. The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful typological generalization across languages. Their common aim is to deepen our understanding of whether and how the information-structural category of focus is represented and marked in natural language. Topics investigated are, among others, the relation of focus and prosody, the effects of information structure on word order, ex situ versus in situ strategies of focus marking, the inventory of focus marking devices, focus and related constructions, focus-sensitive particles. The present inquiry into the focus systems of African languages has repercussions on existing theories of focus. It reveals new focus strategies as well as fine-tuned focus distinctions that are not discussed in the theoretical literature, which is almost exclusively based on well-documented intonation languages.
Book Synopsis Diversity in African languages by : Doris L. Payne
Download or read book Diversity in African languages written by Doris L. Payne and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diversity in African Languages contains a selection of revised papers from the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Oregon. Most chapters focus on single languages, addressing diverse aspects of their phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, information structure, or historical development. These chapters represent nine different genera: Mande, Gur, Kwa, Edoid, Bantu, Nilotic, Gumuzic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Other chapters investigate a mix of languages and families, moving from typological issues to sociolinguistic and inter-ethnic factors that affect language and accent switching. Some chapters are primarily descriptive, while others push forward the theoretical understanding of tone, semantic problems, discourse related structures, and other linguistic systems. The papers on Bantu languages reflect something of the internal richness and continued fascination of the family for linguists, as well as maturation of research on the family. The distribution of other papers highlights the need for intensified research into all the language families of Africa, including basic documentation, in order to comprehend linguistic diversities and convergences across the continent. In this regard, the chapter on Daats’íin (Gumuzic) stands out as the first-ever published article on this hitherto unknown and endangered language found in the Ethiopian-Sudanese border lands.
Book Synopsis A Typology of Morphosyntactic Encoding of Focus in African Languages by : Cristin Kalinowski
Download or read book A Typology of Morphosyntactic Encoding of Focus in African Languages written by Cristin Kalinowski and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most striking features of many languages of Africa is their use of core grammatical structures to encode focus structure. The use of nominal and verbal morphology as well as variations in word order as indicators of focus are prevalent in languages across the continent. While it is known that morphosyntax plays a prominent role in the encoding of focus in Africa, a proliferation of descriptive grammars and investigations into the focus structure of specific African languages over the past decade have made it only recently possible to conduct a large-scale typological investigation into the variation of focus encoding on the continent. This dissertation is a typologicalstudy centered around a collection of focus encoding strategies from 135 languages that was gathered into a comparative database, included at the end of this dissertation, in order to determine the nature of morphosyntactic variation across languages. Using a fine-grained encoding strategy based on the AutoTyp method (Bickel & Nichols 2002), focus encoding constructions were analyzed to determine which morphosyntactic features indicate focus structure. These features were then combined into seven categories based on similarities in grammatical encoding, namely (1) the use of focus markers, (2) syntactic positions, (3) verbal morphology, (4) nominal morphology, (5) the doubling of a constituent in the form of a pronoun or verbal copy, (6) relativization strategies, namely clefts and pseudoclefts, and (7) the morphosyntactic encoding of out-of-focus constituents. It is shown that languages manipulate these strategies, often in combinations, using language-specific variations of these seven strategies. Once these focus encoding strategies were determined, they were compared with other features of the languages involved to determine whether there are any patterns in terms of genealogy, linguistic area, and basic word order. Unsurprisingly, these three features mostly converged. The Afro-Asiatic languages of the Chad-Ethiopia area, which are SOV in word order, prefer nominal morphology as an encoding strategy. Doubling strategies and out-of-focus marking are found in the Niger-Congo languages of the Macro-Sudan area, which are overwhelmingly SVO languages. Patterns were also found when analyzing the kinds of strategies used to focus specific elements of the phrase. Subjects, non-subject constituents (objects and adjuncts) and verbs showed different preferences with respect to the encoding strategies used. Verbs use doubling strategies much more than nominal constituents. Objects and adjuncts tend towards syntactic positions. Subjects use verbal morphology and relativization strategies at a higher rate than their counterparts. Overall, this dissertation confirms the observation made by countless Africanist linguists over the past several decades that morphosyntactic encoding of focus is indeed pervasive and complex. While many languages provide a glimpse of this complexity, the use of a single African language to provide theoretical insights into the grammatical marking of focus presents only a partial view of the extent to which core grammar is manipulated. A cross-linguistic overview allows for the identification of patterns which help to put into context specific strategies found in these languages.
Book Synopsis Language strategies for the domain of colour by : Bleys, Joris
Download or read book Language strategies for the domain of colour written by Bleys, Joris and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a major leap forward in the understanding of colour by showing how richer descriptions of colour samples can be operationalized in agent-based models. Four different language strategies are explored: the basic colour strategy, the graded membership strategy, the category combination strategy and the basic modification strategy. These strategies are firmly rooted in empirical observations in natural languages, with a focus on compositionality at both the syntactic and semantic level. Through a series of in-depth experiments, this book discerns the impact of the environment, language and embodiment on the formation of basic colour systems. Finally, the experiments demonstrate how language users can invent their own language strategies of increasing complexity by combining primitive cognitive operators, and how these strategies can be aligned between language users through linguistic interactions.
Book Synopsis Focus and Topic in African Languages by :
Download or read book Focus and Topic in African Languages written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Languages and Linguistics of Africa by : Tom Güldemann
Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of Africa written by Tom Güldemann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.
Book Synopsis Language Variation - European Perspectives III by : Frans Gregersen
Download or read book Language Variation - European Perspectives III written by Frans Gregersen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Language Variation European Perspectives III" contains 18 selected papers from the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which took place in Copenhagen 2009. The volume includes plenaries by Penelope Eckert ( Where does the social stop? ) and Brit Maehlum (on how cities have been viewed by dialectologists, sociolinguists and lay people). In between these two longer papers, the editors have selected 16 others ranging over a wide field of interest from phonetics (i.a. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Alam) via syntax (Wiese) to information structure (Moore and Snell) and from cognitive semantics (Levshina, Geeraerts and Spelman) to the perceptual study of intonation (Feizollahi and Soukup). Several of the papers concern methodological questions within corpus based studies of variation (Buchstaller and Corrigan, Vangsnes and Johannessen, and Ruus and Duncker). Taken as a whole the papers demonstrate how wide the field of variation studies has become during the last two decades. It is now central to almost all linguistic subfields."
Book Synopsis The Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation in Bantu by : Jenneke van der Wal
Download or read book The Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation in Bantu written by Jenneke van der Wal and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.
Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics by : Augustine Agwuele
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics written by Augustine Agwuele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of African Linguistics provides a holistic coverage of the key themes, subfields, approaches and practical application to the vast areas subsumable under African linguistics that will serve researchers working across the wide continuum in the field. Established and emerging scholars of African languages who are active and current in their fields are brought together, each making use of data from a linguistic group in Africa to explicate a chosen theme within their area of expertise, and illustrate the practice of the discipline in the continent.
Book Synopsis The Expression of Information Structure by : Ines Fiedler
Download or read book The Expression of Information Structure written by Ines Fiedler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session
Book Synopsis Nurturing Language by : Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Download or read book Nurturing Language written by Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph introduces students and scholars in linguistics, anthropology, and intercultural communication to anthropological linguistics, with a special focus on Africa. Among the topics addressed are semantic fields such as kinship or colour terminology, spatial orientation, linguistic relativity and the link between language and cognition, onomastics, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, emotions, (im)politeness strategies, conversation analysis, and non-verbal communication.
Book Synopsis Intonation in African Tone Languages by : Laura J. Downing
Download or read book Intonation in African Tone Languages written by Laura J. Downing and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure by : Caroline Féry
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure written by Caroline Féry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 1133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on focus, topic, and givenness. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including quantification, dislocation, and intonation, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including language processing and acquisition. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.
Book Synopsis Information Structure by : Malte Zimmermann
Download or read book Information Structure written by Malte Zimmermann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication.
Book Synopsis The Pedagogy of African Languages by : Antonia Yétúndé Fọlárìn Schleicher
Download or read book The Pedagogy of African Languages written by Antonia Yétúndé Fọlárìn Schleicher and published by National East Asi Versity. This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 3 by : Tibor Kiss
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 2015-11-13 with total page 938 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.
Book Synopsis Issues in Contemporary African Linguistics by : Ndimele, Ozo-mekuri
Download or read book Issues in Contemporary African Linguistics written by Ndimele, Ozo-mekuri and published by M & J Grand Orbit Communications. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is devoted to Professor Ọladele Awobuluyi of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Nigeria. It contains forty (40) well-researched papers selected through a rigorous assessment process out of the many submitted for consideration. The papers are grouped into four sections: Language and Society; Formal Linguistics; Applied Linguistics; Pragmatics, Language Acquisition & Lexicography. We hope readers will find these papers useful in their continuous quest for invaluable knowledge in African linguistics.
