Adpositions

Adpositions PDF Author: Claude Hagège
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191573469
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This pioneering study is based on an analysis of over 200 languages, including African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are an almost universal part of speech. English has prepositions; some languages, such as Japanese, have postpositions; others have both; and yet others kinds that are not quite either. As grammatical tools they mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence: characteristically one element governs a noun or noun-like word or phrase while the other functions as a predicate. From the syntactic point of view, the complement of an adposition depends on a head: in this last sentence, for example, a head is the complement of on while on a head depends on depends and on is the marker of this dependency. Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. Claude Hagège examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties. He does so for the subsets both of adpositions that express the relations of agent, patient, and beneficiary, and of those which mark space, time, accompaniment, or instrument. Adpositions often govern case and are sometimes gradually grammaticalized into case. The author considers the whole set of function markers, including case, that appear as adpositions and, in doing so, throws light on processes of morphological and syntactic change in different languages and language families. His book will be welcomed by typologists and by syntacticians and morphologists of all theoretical stripes.

Readings in Creole Studies

Readings in Creole Studies PDF Author: Ian F. Hancock
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027270600
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Creole studies embrace a wide range is disciplines: history, ethnography, geography, sociology, etc. The phenomenon of creolization has come to be recognized as widespread; creolization presupposes contact, and that is a human universal. The present anthology discusses social, historical and theoretical aspects of over twenty pidgins and creoles. Part one deals with general theoretical issues, especially those relating to pidgin language formation and expansion. Part two deals with those pidgins and creoles lexically related to indigenous African languages, and with incipient features of creolization in African languages themselves; part three with those related to Romance languages, and part four with those related to English. Throughout the volume, several current debates are taken up, including the still unsettled issues of creole language origins and classification.

Bantu

Bantu PDF Author: Clement M. Doke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351601555
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Originally published in 1945, this volume represented the first to classify Bantu languages. This volume does not record all the dialects but makes reference to those in which some grammatical study has been done and classifies them according to mainly geographical zones. Owing to tribal migrations, individual members of a particular zone may be living among members of a different zone (as has been the case with the Ngoni, South-Eastern Zone, who are found among the Eastern Bantu), but the zone label is taken from the habitat of the majority.

Stylistic Form and Communicative Function in the Nyanja Radio Narratives of Julius Chongo

Stylistic Form and Communicative Function in the Nyanja Radio Narratives of Julius Chongo PDF Author: Ernst Richard Wendland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description


Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation

Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation PDF Author: Tim Thornes
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical linguistics, and function-based approaches to language description define this volume, as does its foci in two major geographical areas — southeast Asia and northwestern North America. All of the papers appeal, in one way or another, to functional-historical approaches to explanation. Behind this appeal lies an assumption that languages are selective in their development in ways that are dependent upon the communicative tasks to which they are put. As such, language function accounts for both variation and historical development over time.

Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan

Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan PDF Author: Joan Perera
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319211366
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This multidisciplinary volume offers insights on oral and written language development and how it takes place in literate societies. The volume covers topics from early to late language development, its interaction with literacy practices, including several languages, monolingual and multilingual contexts, different scripts, as well as typical and atypical development. Inspired by the work of Liliana Tolchinsky, a leading expert in language and literacy development, a group of internationally renowned scholars offers a state-of-the-art overview of current thinking in language development in literate societies in its broadest sense. Contributors offer a personal tribute to Liliana Tolchinsky in the opening section.

Adpositions

Adpositions PDF Author: Claude Hagège
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199575002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. Based on an analysis of 350 languages, this pioneering study examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties.

An Outline of CiNyanja Grammar

An Outline of CiNyanja Grammar PDF Author: Dorothea Lehmann
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
This is the third in a series of publications on Zambian languages and grammar. The intention of the series is to boast the meagre scholarship and availability of educational materials on Zambian languages, which became particularly in urgent in 1996, following the decision of the Zambian government to revert to the policy of using local languages as media of instruction. This volume provides a grammatical sketch of the language commonly known as Nyanja, the mother tongue of some 0.75 million Zambians, and the second largest language group in the country. Nyanja is used by a large population as a second language, is the lingua franca of the armed forces, and is used in official publications and radio broadcasts. It is also spoken in parts of Mozambique and Malawi. The survey is divided into sections on sound systems, morphology and sentence structure.

The Negative Existential Cycle

The Negative Existential Cycle PDF Author: Ljuba Veselinova
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961103399
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description
In 1991, William Croft suggested that negative existentials (typically lexical expressions that mean ‘not exist, not have’) are one possible source for negation markers and gave his hypothesis the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). It is a variationist model based on cross-linguistic data. For a good twenty years following its formulation, it was cited at face-value without ever having been tested by (historical)-comparative data. Over the last decade, Ljuba Veselinova has worked on testing the model in a comparative perspective, and this edited volume further expands on her work. The collection presented here features detailed studies of several language families such as Bantu, Chadic and Indo-European. A number of articles focus on the micro-variation and attested historical developments within smaller groups and clusters such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, and Nanaic. Finally, variation and historical developments in specific languages are discussed for Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Moksha-Mordvin (Uralic), Bashkir (Turkic), Kalmyk (Mongolic), three Pama-Nyungan languages, O’dam (Southern Uto-Aztecan) and Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia). The book is concluded by two chapters devoted to modeling cyclical processes in language change from different theoretical perspectives. Key notions discussed throughout the book include affirmative and negative existential constructions, the expansion of the latter into verbal negation, and subsequently from more specific to more general markers of negation. Nominalizations as well as the uses of negative existentials as standalone negative answers figure among the most frequent pathways whereby negative existentials evolve as general negation markers. The operation of the Negative Existential Cycle appears partly genealogically conditioned, as the cycle is found to iterate regularly within some families but never starts in others, as is the case in Bantu. In addition, other special negation markers such as nominal negators are found to undergo similar processes, i.e. they expand into the verbal domain and thereby develop into more general negation markers. The book provides rich information on a specific path of the evolution of negation, on cyclical processes in language change, and it show-cases the historical-comparative method in a modern setting.

The Bantu Bibliography

The Bantu Bibliography PDF Author: Jouni Maho
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bantu languages
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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Book Description


Language and Decolonisation

Language and Decolonisation PDF Author: Finex Ndhlovu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040039685
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Language and Decolonisation is the first collection to bring together views from across scholarly communities that are committed to the agenda of decolonising knowledge in language study. Edited by leading figures in the field, the chapters offer new insights on how ‘decolonising’ can be adopted as a methodology for charting the next steps in solving practical language-related problems in educational and related social policy areas. Divided into two sections, the book covers the coloniality of language, the materiality of culture and colonial scripts, the decolonisation imperative, multilingualism discourse and decolonisation, and decolonising languages in public discourse. With 20 chapters authored by experts from across the globe, this pioneering collection is an essential reference and resource for advanced students, scholars, and researchers of language and culture, sociolinguistics, decolonial studies, racial studies, and related areas.