A Grammar of Yidin

A Grammar of Yidin PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521214629
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Professor Dixon examines the grammar of Yidin, an Australian dying language, through phonology, syntax and of a 'mixed ergative' type that cannot easily be accommodated in terms of standard syntactic theory.

A Grammar of Yidin

A Grammar of Yidin PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521214629
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Professor Dixon examines the grammar of Yidin, an Australian dying language, through phonology, syntax and of a 'mixed ergative' type that cannot easily be accommodated in terms of standard syntactic theory.

A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian

A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226154282
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The people who live in the Boumaa region of the Fijian island of Taveuni speak a dialect of Fijian that is mutually intelligible with Standard Fijian, the two differing as much perhaps as do the American and British varieties of English. During 1985, R. M. W. Dixon—one of the most insightful of linguists engaged in descriptive studies today—lived in the village of Waitabu and studied the language spoken there. He found in Boumaa Fijian a wealth of striking features unknown in commonly studied languages and on the basis of his fieldwork prepared this grammar. Fijian is an agglutinating language, one in which words are formed by the profligate combining of morphemes. There are no case inflections, and tense and aspect as shown by independent clitics or words within a predicate complex. Most verbs come in both transitive and intransitive forms, and nouns can be build up regularly from verbal parts and verbs from nouns. The language is also marked by a highly developed pronoun system and by a vocabulary rich in areas of social significance. In the opening chapters, Dixon describes the Islands' political, social, and linguistic organization, outlines the main points of Fijian phonology, and presents an overview of the grammar. In succeeding chapters, he examines a number of grammatical topics in greater detail, including clause and phrase structure, verbal syntax, deictics, and anaphora. The volume also includes a full vocabulary of all forms treated in discussion and three of the fifteen texts recorded from monolingual village elders on which the grammar is based.

A grammar of Kukama-Kukamiria

A grammar of Kukama-Kukamiria PDF Author: Rosa Vallejos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004314520
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 773

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive description of Kukama-Kukamiria, spoken by about 1000 elders in the Peruvian Amazon. The empirical basis for the grammar is fifteen years of fieldwork, including text data from 36 fluent speakers. Seventeen chapters deal with phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse phenomena. Salient typological features include a robust morphological distinction between male and female speech; the expression of TAM categories via fixed clitics; the encoding of three-place predicates by means of transitive clauses; six directive constructions that distinguish degrees of pragmatic force; and multiple types of purpose clauses that differ in terms of coreference control. This grammar also shows the Tupí-Guarani origin of an important number of Kukama-Kukamiria grammatical structures and advances comparative studies in the region.

A Grammar of Warrongo

A Grammar of Warrongo PDF Author: Tasaku Tsunoda
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110238772
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 783

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Book Description
Warrongo is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language that used to be spoken in northeast Australia. This volume is largely based on the rich data recorded from the last fluent speaker. It details the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. In particular, it provides a truly scrutinizing description of syntactic ergativity - a phenomenon that is rare among the world's language. It also shows that, unlike some other Australian languages, Warrongo has noun phrases that are configurational. Overall this volume shows what can be documented of a language that has only one speaker.

A Grammar of Kayardild

A Grammar of Kayardild PDF Author: Nicholas D. Evans
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110873737
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

A Grammar of Kambera

A Grammar of Kambera PDF Author: Marian Klamer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110805537
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1 PDF Author: Tibor Kiss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110377403
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
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.

An Introduction to Syntax

An Introduction to Syntax PDF Author: Robert D. Van Valin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521635660
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The book guides students through the basic concepts involved in syntactic analysis and goes on to prepare them for further work in any syntactic theory, using examples from a range of phenomena in human languages. It also includes a chapter on theories of syntax.

Are Some Languages Better than Others?

Are Some Languages Better than Others? PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191079413
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book sets out to answer a question that many linguists have been hesitant to ask: are some languages better than others? Can we say, for instance, that because German has three genders and French only two, German is a better language in this respect? Jarawara, spoken in the Amazonian jungle, has two ways of showing possession: one for a part (e.g. 'Father's foot') and the other for something which is owned and can be given away or sold (e.g. 'Father's knife'); is it thus a better language, in this respect, than English, which marks all possession in the same way? R. M. W. Dixon begins by outlining what he feels are the essential components of any language, such as the ability to pose questions, command actions, and provide statements. He then discusses desirable features including gender agreement, tenses, and articles, before concluding with his view of what the ideal language would look like - and an explanation of why it does not and probably never will exist. Written in the author's usual accessible and engaging style, and full of personal anecdotes and unusual linguistic phenomena, the book will be of interest to all general language enthusiasts as well as to a linguistics student audience, and particularly to anyone with an interest in linguistic typology.

Changing Valency

Changing Valency PDF Author: Robert M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521660394
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Distinguished scholars examine the phenomena of passives and causatives in languages from around the world.