A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque

A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque PDF Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191029807
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book provides a clear and comprehensive description of the Ocotepec/Tapalapa variant of Chiapas Zoque. Zoque is one of the two major branches of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, spoken in the southern part of Mexico. Until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century the Mixe-Zoquean languages covered a large area from Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the border of Guatemala and the Pacific coast. Inscriptions in Zoque from the first half of the first millennium AD are the oldest known linguistic documents in Mesoamerica.The Zoquean area once included the entire heartland of the Olmecs, who almost certainly spoke a proto-Zoquean or proto-Mixe-Zoquean language. The Zoques are thus the most likely direct descendents of the oldest known civilization of Mexico. As a result of a long history of close contact, Zoque and Mayan share areal features, and there are lexical borrowings in both directions, but genetically and typologically they are clearly distinct. The Zoque-speaking area has shrunk considerably since pre-colonial times. In 1982 an eruption from the volcano Chichonal destroyed a central part of the Zoque core area and caused a mass migration of Zoque speakers to parts of Mexico where Spanish is the dominant language. This record of an unusual and critically endangered language will be a vital resource for linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque

A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque PDF Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191029807
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a clear and comprehensive description of the Ocotepec/Tapalapa variant of Chiapas Zoque. Zoque is one of the two major branches of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, spoken in the southern part of Mexico. Until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century the Mixe-Zoquean languages covered a large area from Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the border of Guatemala and the Pacific coast. Inscriptions in Zoque from the first half of the first millennium AD are the oldest known linguistic documents in Mesoamerica.The Zoquean area once included the entire heartland of the Olmecs, who almost certainly spoke a proto-Zoquean or proto-Mixe-Zoquean language. The Zoques are thus the most likely direct descendents of the oldest known civilization of Mexico. As a result of a long history of close contact, Zoque and Mayan share areal features, and there are lexical borrowings in both directions, but genetically and typologically they are clearly distinct. The Zoque-speaking area has shrunk considerably since pre-colonial times. In 1982 an eruption from the volcano Chichonal destroyed a central part of the Zoque core area and caused a mass migration of Zoque speakers to parts of Mexico where Spanish is the dominant language. This record of an unusual and critically endangered language will be a vital resource for linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque

A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque PDF Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199693218
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book provides a description of Chiapas Zoque, the language of the descendents of Mexico's oldest known civilization and whose inscriptions are the oldest known linguistic documents in Mesoamerica. This record of an unusual, vibrant, but critically endangered language will be an important resource for linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

A Grammar of Sierra Popoluca

A Grammar of Sierra Popoluca PDF Author: Lynda Boudreault
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110766272
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 743

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Book Description
This work is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This detailed description and analysis includes an overview of the language and its family, its typological features and its phonology. The grammar also provides an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. An agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language with ergative-absolutive alignment and sensitivity to animacy and saliency hierarchies, Sierra Popoluca has a number of strategies to form complex predicates, which include verb serialization, noun incorporation, and dependent verb constructions. These complex predicate formation strategies and sentence-level syntax are also described here. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. There is no competing work that provides the breadth and depth of coverage of the Sierra Popoluca grammar.

In Search of Universal Grammar

In Search of Universal Grammar PDF Author: Terje Lohndal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027272433
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This volume in honor of Jan Terje Faarlund covers the areas in which he has contributed to linguistic theorizing, ranging from in-depth studies of Norwegian and Scandinavian grammar both synchronically and diachronically, to work on the Indian language Chiapas Zoque. The book is organized thematically with two chapters on each topic: The grammar of the Scandinavian languages (Tor A. Åfarli and Christer Platzack); language policies and sociolinguistics (Unn Røyneland and Peter Trudgill); French (Hans Petter Helland and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen); language change (Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen); lesser-studied languages (Alice Harris and Jerry Sadock); language acquisition (David Lightfoot and Marit Westergaard); and language evolution (Erika Hagelberg and Salikoko Mufwene). This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from students to scholars working on any of the areas covered.

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis PDF Author: Michael Fortescue
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506206
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1398

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Book Description
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.

Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar

Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar PDF Author: Ian G. Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198804636
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 730

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Book Description
In this book, Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist programme. The book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation.

The Mayan Languages

The Mayan Languages PDF Author: Judith Aissen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351754793
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 902

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Book Description
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.

The Evolution of Language

The Evolution of Language PDF Author: C. Scott-Philips Thomas
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814401501
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
Proceedings of Evolang IX, the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. The Evolang conferences are the leading international conferences for new findings in the study of the origins and evolution of language. They attract a multidisciplinary audience. The proceedings are an important resource for researchers in the field.

The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages

The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages PDF Author: Daniel Siddiqi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135181026X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 839

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages is a one-stop reference for linguists on those topics that come up the most frequently in the study of the languages of North America (including Mexico). This handbook compiles a list of contributors from across many different theories and at different stages of their careers, all of whom are well-known experts in North American languages. The volume comprises two distinct parts: the first surveys some of the phenomena most frequently discussed in the study of North American languages, and the second surveys some of the most frequently discussed language families of North America. The consistent goal of each contribution is to couch the content of the chapter in contemporary theory so that the information is maximally relevant and accessible for a wide range of audiences, including graduate students and young new scholars, and even senior scholars who are looking for a crash course in the topics. Empirically driven chapters provide fundamental knowledge needed to participate in contemporary theoretical discussions of these languages, making this handbook an indispensable resource for linguistics scholars.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody PDF Author: Carlos Gussenhoven
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198832230
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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Book Description
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.