Austronesian Undressed

Austronesian Undressed PDF Author: David Gil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260532
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

Austronesian Undressed

Austronesian Undressed PDF Author: David Gil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260532
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia

The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia PDF Author: Alexander Adelaar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192534262
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1089

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in Part II explore language contact between Malayo-Polynesian and unrelated languages, as well as sociolinguistic issues such as multilingualism, language policy, and language endangerment. Part III provides detailed overviews of the different groupings of Malayo-Polynesian languages, while Part IV offers in-depth studies of important typological features across the whole linguistic area. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia will be an essential reference for students and researchers specializing in Austronesian languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.

The Creole Debate

The Creole Debate PDF Author: John H. McWhorter
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108428649
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
A compelling argument for why creoles are their own unique entity, which have developed independently of other processes of language development and change.

A Grammatical Sketch of Hainan Cham

A Grammatical Sketch of Hainan Cham PDF Author: Graham Thurgood
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614516049
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is a grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham, an endangered tonal Austronesian language. The study focuses on three areas: social background and contact history, the grammar (including all the recorded vocabulary), and a description of the sound system (including acoustic description). The appendixes also include the wordlist of Sanya Chinese forms and four analyzed texts.

Human Dispersal and Species Movement

Human Dispersal and Species Movement PDF Author: Nicole Boivin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107164141
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Get Book Here

Book Description
A unique, interdisciplinary and up-to-date treatment exploring human migration and its role in creating novel ecosystems over the long term.

Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity

Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity PDF Author: John H. McWhorter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1934078379
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics

Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics PDF Author: Kunio Nishiyama
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263299
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dedicated to John B. Whitman, this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Austronesian, Indo-Aryan, and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics, acquisition, processing and phonology, from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives, this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests, which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.

The Papuan Languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3

The Papuan Languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3 PDF Author: Antoinette Schapper
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501511157
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
These volumes present sketches of the Papuan languages scattered over the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Together they give an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the unique and diverse grammars of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages, a family of 'Papuan outliers' located at the western perimeter of Melanesia. While largely undescribed until recently, the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages are now among the most intensively studied Papuan families. In this third volume, five new sketches of members of the family are presented, all written by specialist linguists on the basis of original field work.

The Complexities of Morphology

The Complexities of Morphology PDF Author: Peter Arkadiev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192605518
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, investigating primarily whether certain aspects of morphology can be considered more complex than others, and how that complexity can be measured. The book opens with a detailed introduction from the editors that critically assesses the foundational assumptions that inform contemporary approaches to morphological complexity. In the chapters that follow, the volume's expert contributors approach the topic from typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives; the concluding chapter offers an overview of these various approaches, with a focus on the minimum description length principle. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from both well-known languages such as Russian and lesser-studied languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.

A grammar of Kalamang

A grammar of Kalamang PDF Author: Eline Visser
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961103437
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people in the villages Mas and Antalisa on the biggest of the Karas Islands, which lie just off the coast of Bomberai Peninsula. This work is the first comprehensive grammar of a Papuan language in the Bomberai area. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. This grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other West Bomberai or eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment. This grammar is accompanied by an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material and a dictionary with 2700 lemmas. It serves as a document of one of the world's many endangered languages.