A Grammar of Hup

A Grammar of Hup PDF Author: Patience Epps
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199076
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1009

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Book Description
This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

A Grammar of Hup

A Grammar of Hup PDF Author: Patience Epps
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199076
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1009

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

The Oxford Handbook of African Languages

The Oxford Handbook of African Languages PDF Author: Rainer Vossen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199609896
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 1104

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Book Description
Une source inconnue indique : "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. It covers a wide range of topics, from grammatical sketches of individual languages to sociocultural and extralinguistic issues."

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World PDF Author: Simone Mattiola
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262586
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

Number – Constructions and Semantics

Number – Constructions and Semantics PDF Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

Bantu Studies

Bantu Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description


The Expression of Information Structure

The Expression of Information Structure PDF Author: Ines Fiedler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027206724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session

Beyond Aspect

Beyond Aspect PDF Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027267871
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Certain grammatical elements help hearers know how propositions are conceptually related: Does a given proposition advance the foregrounded event line, or not? Initiate versus continue an event chain? Indicate that one proposition belongs to a different "mental space" from the previous one? Provide background information? Studies in this volume show that African languages sometimes support, but often refute the idea that perfective aspect or past tense marks the narrative event line. Rather, languages may employ clause level constructions, conjunctions or connectives, tonal melodies on verbs or subjects, specialized auxiliaries, special verb forms and even dependent clause and imperfective aspect forms. Often, correlation of such grammatical elements with the event line is a subcase of a more general function. Analyses in this volume contribute to developing a typology of the expression of discourse functions, a field of research which has so far been minimally addressed from a typological perspective.

Occasional Papers in Linguistics

Occasional Papers in Linguistics PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African languages
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description


Linguistic Categories, Language Description and Linguistic Typology

Linguistic Categories, Language Description and Linguistic Typology PDF Author: Luca Alfieri
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259941
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I PDF Author: Francesca Di Garbo
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101787
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.