A Study of Saisiyat Morphology

A Study of Saisiyat Morphology PDF Author: Elizabeth Zeitoun
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824850425
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Saisiyat is a Formosan language spoken in the north-western part of Taiwan. It is divided into two groups, a northern and a southern group. The Northern group used to speak the Taai dialect (also known as the Northern dialect) and lives in the upper reaches of the Shangping river in Wufeng Township, Hsinchu County. It is now largely acculturated to the Atayal. The Southern group speaks the Tungho dialect, also referred to as the Southern dialect. Most of the population is distributed throughout the valley delineated by the Eastern and the Southern rivers in Nanchuang Township, Miaoli County and further divided into two major communities, Tungho and Penglai dispersed in a number of villages/settlements. A small amount of the population among the Southern group is also located in the upper reaches of the Shihtan River in Shihtan Township, Miaoli County and forms a third community, referred to as Shihtan. The major difference between the two dialects is said to lie in their phonologies but no study has so far attempted to determine the amount of lexical and morpho-syntactic variation. The goal of this monograph is to provide a functional and empirically-based study of the morphology of Tungho Saisiyat in an attempt to clarify the morphological units, morphological processes, major lexical categories of this language and further discuss its nominal and verbal morphology. The choice to orient this study towards morphology is explained by the fact that even though Saisiyat is now one of the best documented Formosan languages – there is one grammatical sketch and numerous studies on various aspects of Saisiyat grammar – there are still few studies on Saisiyat morphology, which level of complexity has been overlooked in the past.

A Study of Saisiyat Morphology

A Study of Saisiyat Morphology PDF Author: Elizabeth Zeitoun
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824850425
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Saisiyat is a Formosan language spoken in the north-western part of Taiwan. It is divided into two groups, a northern and a southern group. The Northern group used to speak the Taai dialect (also known as the Northern dialect) and lives in the upper reaches of the Shangping river in Wufeng Township, Hsinchu County. It is now largely acculturated to the Atayal. The Southern group speaks the Tungho dialect, also referred to as the Southern dialect. Most of the population is distributed throughout the valley delineated by the Eastern and the Southern rivers in Nanchuang Township, Miaoli County and further divided into two major communities, Tungho and Penglai dispersed in a number of villages/settlements. A small amount of the population among the Southern group is also located in the upper reaches of the Shihtan River in Shihtan Township, Miaoli County and forms a third community, referred to as Shihtan. The major difference between the two dialects is said to lie in their phonologies but no study has so far attempted to determine the amount of lexical and morpho-syntactic variation. The goal of this monograph is to provide a functional and empirically-based study of the morphology of Tungho Saisiyat in an attempt to clarify the morphological units, morphological processes, major lexical categories of this language and further discuss its nominal and verbal morphology. The choice to orient this study towards morphology is explained by the fact that even though Saisiyat is now one of the best documented Formosan languages – there is one grammatical sketch and numerous studies on various aspects of Saisiyat grammar – there are still few studies on Saisiyat morphology, which level of complexity has been overlooked in the past.

Prominence in Austronesian

Prominence in Austronesian PDF Author: Bethwyn Evans
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730812
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cognitive concept of prominence is increasingly seen as key to understanding the organisation of grammar. This volume explores the encoding of prominence in languages from across the Austronesian family. The contributions show how prominence is relevant to understanding asymmetries at different levels of grammatical structure, from discourse and information structure to argument expression and socio-pragmatics. Moreover, common themes across contributions point to crosslinguistic tendencies that underpin the conventionalisation of communicative patterns for coordinating interlocutors' attention, and to points of departure for further crosslinguistic exploration of how grammatical asymmetries can be explained in terms of prominence.

The polyfunctionality of 'still' expressions

The polyfunctionality of 'still' expressions PDF Author: Bastian Persohn
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 783

Get Book Here

Book Description
Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This volume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammarians alike.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology PDF Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199641641
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 961

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009), aiming to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters are devoted to theoretical and definitional matters, formal and semantic issues, interdisciplinary connections, and detailed descriptions of derivational processes in a wide range of language families. It presents the reader with the current state of the art in the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. Chapters are devoted to issues of theory, methodology, the historical development of derivation, and to child language acquisition, sociolinguistic, experimental, and psycholinguistic approaches. The second half of the book surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics. It ends with a consideration of both areal tendencies in derivation and the issue of universals.

Borrowed Morphology

Borrowed Morphology PDF Author: Francesco Gardani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614513201
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
By integrating novel developments in both contact linguistics and morphological theory, this volume pursues the topic of borrowed morphology by recourse to sophisticated theoretical and methodological accounts. The authors address fundamental issues, such as the alleged universal dispreference for morphological borrowing and its effects on morphosyntactic complexity, and corroborate their analyses with strong cross-linguistic evidence.

A Dictionary of Nafsan, South Efate, Vanuatu

A Dictionary of Nafsan, South Efate, Vanuatu PDF Author: Nicholas Thieberger
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824890515
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a dictionary of Nafsan, the language spoken in Vanuatu in the south of Efate Island in the villages of Erakor, Pango, and Eratap. Nafsan is one of 130 distinct languages spoken in Vanuatu. Over several decades, linguist Nicholas Thieberger worked in close collaboration with the Erakor community to record this unique language and to refine its written presentation. The resulting publication offers insight into the diversity of meanings available to speakers of Nafsan, providing some 3,400 senses for Nafsan words and an English-Nafsan finderlist. In addition, the book gives an overview of the Nafsan sound system, provides a list of existing literature on the language dating back to early missionary translations, and includes maps of Efate locating nearly 200 place names. Readers will also find South Efate cultural knowledge embedded in the explanations of the Nafsan words and their usages. A welcome companion to Thieberger’s A Grammar of South Efate (2006), this book complements and significantly augments other multimedia resources made available online by the author.

Grammatical Analysis

Grammatical Analysis PDF Author: Stanley Starosta
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824821050
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume focuses on problems in the morphological and syntactic analysis of certain Asian and Pacific languages, bringing to bear alternative theories of grammar, including relational, categorical, and lexicase dependency grammar, and a whole-word approach to morphology.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

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

Get Book Here

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.

Nominalization in Asian Languages

Nominalization in Asian Languages PDF Author: Foong Ha Yap
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287244
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 818

Get Book Here

Book Description
Research on nominalization, a process that gives rise to referring expressions, has always played a central role in linguistic investigations. Over the years there has also been growing evidence that nominalization constructions often extend to non-referential domains. They participate in noun-modifying expressions (e.g. genitive and relative clauses), subordinate clauses and topic constructions, finite structures with the nominalizers reanalyzed as TAM markers, and stance constructions with evaluative, attitudinal, evidential and epistemic overtones. This volume brings together historical and crosslinguistic evidence from more than 20 different languages representing six different language families spanning the Asian continent and the Pacific and Indian oceans to elucidate the strategies and grammaticalization pathways that give rise to both referential and non-referential uses of nominalization constructions. This collection highlights the diversity of strategies and at the same time the robust cyclical nature of change within and across languages. The combined diachronic and typological analyses in this volume are particularly valuable for linguistic research on diachronic morphosyntax and linguistic ‘universals’, and are also an important supplementary cross-referencing tool for linguistic investigations of versatile and ubiquitous morphemes in under-documented languages.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics PDF Author: William S.-Y. Wang
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199856338
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 793

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.