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Author : Mauro Tosco
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)
Download or read book The Dhaasanac Language written by Mauro Tosco and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Ronny Meyer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191044245
Total Pages : 1425 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages written by Ronny Meyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 1425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring both their structures and features and their function and use in society. The first part of the volume provides background and general information relating to Ethiopian languages, including their demographic distribution and classification, language policy, scripts and writing, and language endangerment. Subsequent parts are dedicated to the four major language families in Ethiopia - Cushitic, Ethiosemitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic - and contain studies of individual languages, with an initial introductory overview chapter in each part. Both major and less-documented languages are included, ranging from Amharic and Oromo to Zay, Gawwada, and Yemsa. The final part explores languages that are outside of those four families, namely Ethiopian Sign Language, Ethiopian English, and Arabic. With its international team of senior researchers and junior scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages will appeal to anyone interested in the languages of the region and in African linguistics more broadly.
Author : Matthias Brenzinger
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004274294
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)
Download or read book The Body in Language written by Matthias Brenzinger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Body in Language: Comparative studies of Linguistic Embodiment provides new insights into the theory of linguistic embodiment in its universal and cultural aspects. The contributions of the volume offer theoretical reflections on grammaticalization, lexical semantics, philosophy, multimodal communication and - by discussing metaphorization and metonymy in figurative language - on cognitive linguistics in general. Case studies contribute first-hand data on embodiment from more than 15 languages and present findings on the body in language in diverse cultures from various continents. Embodiment fundamentally underlies human conceptualization and the present discussions reveal a wide range of target domains in conceptual transfers with the body as the source domain.
Author : Osamu Hieda
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027273952
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)
Download or read book Geographical Typology and Linguistic Areas written by Osamu Hieda and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Africa a linguistic area (Heine & Leyew 2008)? The present volume consists of sixteen papers highlighting the linguistic geography of Africa, covering, in particular, southern Africa with its Khoisan languages. A wide range of phenomena are discussed to give an overview of the pattern of social, cultural, and linguistic interaction that characterizes Africa's linguistic geography. Most contributors to the volume discuss language contact and areal diffusion in Africa, although some demonstrate, with examples from non-African linguistic data, including Amazonian and European languages, how language contact may lead to structural convergence. Others investigate contact phenomena in social-cultural behavior. The volume makes a large contribution toward bringing generalized theory to data-oriented discussions. It is intended to stimulate further research on contact phenomena in Africa. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.
Author : Carol Genetti
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107782570
Total Pages : 677 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (77 download)
Download or read book How Languages Work written by Carol Genetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and exciting introduction to linguistics, this textbook presents language in all its amazing complexity, while guiding students gently through the basics. Students emerge with an appreciation of the diversity of the world's languages, as well as a deeper understanding of the structure of human language, the ways it is used, and its broader social and cultural context. Chapters introducing the nuts and bolts of language study (phonology, syntax, meaning) are combined with those on the 'functions' of language (discourse, prosody, pragmatics, and language contact), helping students gain a better grasp of how language works in the real world. A rich set of language 'profiles' help students explore the world's linguistic diversity, identify similarities and differences between languages, and encourages them to apply concepts from earlier chapter material. A range of carefully designed pedagogical features encourage student engagement, adopting a step-by-step approach and using study questions and case studies.
Author : Rainer Vossen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191007382
Total Pages : 1104 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African Languages written by Rainer Vossen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 1104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Africa is believed to host at least one third of the world's languages, usually classified into four phyla - Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan - which are then subdivided into further families and subgroupings. This volume explores all aspects of research in the field, beginning with chapters that cover the major domains of grammar and comparative approaches. Later parts provide overviews of the phyla and subfamilies, alongside grammatical sketches of eighteen representative African languages of diverse genetic affiliation. The volume additionally explores multiple other topics relating to African languages and linguistics, with a particular focus on extralinguistic issues: language, cognition, and culture, including colour terminology and conversation analysis; language and society, including language contact and endangerment; language and history; and language and orature. This wide-ranging handbook will be a valuable reference for scholars and students in all areas of African linguistics and anthropology, and for anyone interested in descriptive, documentary, typological, and comparative linguistics.
Author : Felix K. Ameka
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110197693
Total Pages : 671 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (11 download)
Download or read book Catching Language written by Felix K. Ameka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.
Author : Martin Maiden
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191056391
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)
Download or read book The Romance Verb written by Martin Maiden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive comparative-historical survey of patterns of alternation in the Romance verb which appear to be 'autonomously morphological': although they can be shown to be persistent through time, they have long ceased to be conditioned by any phonological or functional determinant. Some of these patterns are well known in Romance linguistics, while others have scarcely been noticed. The sheer range of phenomena which participate in these patterns in any case far surpasses what Romance linguists had previously realized. The patterns constitute a kind of abstract 'leitmotiv', running through the history of the Romance languages and conferring on them a distinctive morphological physiognomy. Although intended primarily as a novel contribution to comparative-historical Romance linguistics, the book considers in detail the status of these patterns which appear to be a matter of 'morphology by itself', unsupported by determining factors external to the morphological system. Particular attention is paid to the problem of their persistence, self-replication, and reinforcement over time. Why do abstract morphological patterns that quite literally 'do not make sense' display such diachronic robustness? The evidence suggests that speakers, faced with different ways of expressing semantically identical material, seek out distributional templates into which those differences can be deployed. In Romance the only available templates happen to be 'morphomic', morphologically accidental, effects of old sound changes or defunct functional conditionings. Those patterns are accordingly exploited, and indeed reinforced, by being made maximally predictable.
Author : Bernd Heine
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192871498
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)
Download or read book The Grammar of Interactives written by Bernd Heine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveals that speakers make use of two contrasting modes for structuring their discourses, both of which are needed for successful communication: one is sentence grammar, which has a propositional format and analytic organization; the other is interactive grammar, which has a holophrastic organization and a focus on social communication. While the argument structure of sentence grammar is shaped by the propositional format of sentences, that of interactive grammar is shaped by the indexical nature of the situation of discourse. This distinction shows interesting correlations both with findings from neurolinguistic studies on differential activity in the two hemispheres of the human brain, and with observations from social psychology on the differences between systems of reasoning and judgment.
Author : Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191559628
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)
Download or read book The Evolution of Morphology written by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the more general contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The consensus in many fields is that language is well designed for its purpose, and became so either through natural selection or by virtue of non-biological constraints on how language must be structured. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy argues that in certain crucial respects language is not optimally designed. This can be seen, he suggests, in the existence of not one but two kinds of grammatical organization - syntax and morphology - and in the morphological and morpho-phonological complexity which leads to numerous departures from the one-form-one-meaning principle. Having discussed the issue of good and bad design in a wider biological context, the author shows that conventional explanations for the nature of morphology do not work. Its poor design features arose, he argues, from two characteristics present when the ancestors of modern humans had a vocabulary but no grammar. One of these was a synonymy-avoidance expectation, while the other was an articulatory and phonological apparatus that encouraged the development of new synonyms. Morphology developed in response to these conflicting pressures. In this stimulating and carefully argued account Professor McCarthy offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of the relationship between syntax and morphology, to the adaptationist view of language evolution, and to the notion that language in some way reflects 'laws of form'. This fundamental contribution to understanding the nature and evolution of language will be of wide interest to linguists of all theoretical persuasions as well as to scholars in cognitive science and anthropology.
Author : Sebastian Fedden
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192514784
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)
Download or read book Non-Canonical Gender Systems written by Sebastian Fedden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the boundaries of the category of gender and their theoretical significance within the framework of Canonical Typology. Grammatical gender is a famously puzzling category: although it has been widely explored from a typological perspective, studies are constantly identifying exciting and unexpected patterns in gender systems, many of which cannot be easily classified or straightforwardly analysed. Some of these patterns stretch or even threaten to cross the largely unexplored outer boundaries of the category. In the canonical approach, morphosyntactic features like gender are established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline to measure the actual examples observed. In this volume, international experts use this approach to analyse a range of gender systems that diverge from the canonical ideal, and to determine to what extent each component property of these systems can be considered canonical. Chapters explore a wide range of typologically diverse languages from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, and from Central Italy to Northern Australia. The book will be of interest to all linguists working in the field of typology, from graduate level upwards, as well as to morphologists and syntacticians of all theoretical stripes who have an interest in grammatical gender.
Author : Eva Zimmermann
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198747322
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)
Download or read book Morphological Length and Prosodically Defective Morphemes written by Eva Zimmermann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines specific sound changes that cannot be explained by phonological means alone but crucially rely on morphological information. It offers a unified theoretical account of these phenomena as well as a rich database of attested patterns in the world's languages
Author : John A. Goldsmith
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110246228
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (12 download)
Download or read book Tones and Features written by John A. Goldsmith and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes papers by leading figures in phonetics and phonology on two topics central to phonological theory: tones and phonological features. Papers address a wide range of topics bearing on tones and features including their formal representation and phonetic foundation.
Author : Geert E. Booij
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402029004
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (2 download)
Download or read book Yearbook of Morphology 2004 written by Geert E. Booij and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-07-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. In the Yearbook of Morphology 2004 a number of papers is devoted to the topic ‘morphology and linguistic typology’. These papers were presented at the Fourth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting in Catania, in September 2003. Within the context of this denominator, a number of issues are discussed wich bear upon universals and typology. These issues include: universals and diachrony, sign language, syncretism, periphrasis, etc.
Author : Prakash Mondal
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003862594
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)
Download or read book The Cognitive Variation of Semantic Structures written by Prakash Mondal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the cognitive constraints and principles of variation in structures of linguistic meaning across languages. It unifies cognitive-semantic representations with formal-semantic representations to make a unique contribution to the study of typological generalizations and universals in natural language semantics. This unified approach not only helps reveal why semantic structures have the observed variation they have but also sheds light on the compelling cognitive and formal regularities and patterns in the variation of linguistic semantics. The book also advances the general principles of a cognitively oriented semantic typology. Lucid and topical, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of language typology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics and semantics. It will also be of interest to theoretical linguists of both cognitivist and formalist schools.
Author : Sambulo Ndlovu
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110759373
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)
Download or read book Personal Names and Naming from an Anthropological-Linguistic Perspective written by Sambulo Ndlovu and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fills a gap in the literature as it uniquely approaches onomastics from the perspective of both anthropology and linguistics. It addresses names and cultures from 16 countries and five continents, thus offering readers an opportunity to comprehend and compare names and naming practices across cultures. The chapters presented in this book explore the cultural significance of personal names, naming ceremonies, conventions and practices. They illustrate how these names and practices perform certain culture-specific functions, such as religion, identity and social activity. Some chapters address the socio-political significance of personal names and their expression of self and otherness. The book also links the linguistic structure of personal names to culture by looking at their morphology, syntax and semantics. It is divided into four sections: Section 1 demonstrates how personal names perform human culture, Section 2 focuses on how personal names index socio-political transitioning, Section 3 demonstrates religious values in personal names and naming, and Section 4 links linguistic structure and analysis of personal names to culture and heritage.
Author : Harry van der Hulst
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192543067
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)
Download or read book Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony written by Harry van der Hulst and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.
