Koasati Grammar

Koasati Grammar PDF Author: Bel Abbey
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227255
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 674

Get Book Here

Book Description
An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati. The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.

Koasati Grammar

Koasati Grammar PDF Author: Bel Abbey
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227255
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 674

Get Book Here

Book Description
An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati. The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.

The Languages of Native North America

The Languages of Native North America PDF Author: Marianne Mithun
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521298759
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 800

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

The Linguistic Cycle : Language Change and the Language Faculty

The Linguistic Cycle : Language Change and the Language Faculty PDF Author: Department of English Arizona State University Elly van Gelderen Regents' Professor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199857636
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.

Adjective Classes

Adjective Classes PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533793
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book shows that every language has an adjective class and examines how these vary in size and character. The opening chapter considers current generalizations about the nature and classification of adjectives and sets out the cross-linguistic parameters of their variation. Thirteen chapters then explore adjective classes in languages from North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Studies of well-known languages such as Russian, Japanese, Korean and Lao are juxtaposed with the languages of small hunter-gatherer and slash-and-burn agriculturalist groups. All are based on fine-grained field research. The nature and typology of adjective classes are then reconsidered in the conclusion. This pioneering work shows, among other things, that the grammatical properties of the adjective class may be similar to nouns or verbs or both or neither; that some languages have two kinds of adjectives, one hard to distinguish from nouns and the other from verbs; that the adjective class can sometimes be large and open, and in other cases small and closed. The book will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology and of the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Each book in this series focuses on an aspect of language that is of current theoretical interest and for which there has not previously or recently been any full-scale cross-linguistic study. The series is for typologists, fieldworkers, and theory developers at graduate level and above. The books will be suited for use as the basis for advanced seminars and courses. The subjects of next three volumes will be serial verb constructions, complementation, and grammars in contact.

Pronouns

Pronouns PDF Author: D. N. Shankara Bhat
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199269122
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the basis of a cross-linguistic study of over 250 languages, this book brings to light several fascinating characteristics of pronouns. It argues that these words do not form a single category, but rather two different categories called 'personal pronouns' and 'proforms'. It points outseveral differences between the two, such as the occurrence of a dual structure among proforms but not among personal pronouns. These differences are shown to derive from the distinct functions that the two categories have to perform in language.The book also shows that the so-called interrogative pronouns of familiar languages do not actually have interrogation as their meaning. One can only assign the meaning of indefiniteness to them. Further, the notion of indefiniteness that can be associated with these and other pronouns is quitedifferent from the one that can be associated with noun phrases. Other interesting aspects of this book include the postulation of certain typological distinctions like 'two-person' and 'three-person' languages and 'free-pronoun' and 'bound-pronoun' languages.

Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork

Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork PDF Author: Shobhana L. Chelliah
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048190266
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork is the most comprehensive reference on linguistic fieldwork on the market bringing together all the reader needs to carry out successful linguistic fieldwork. Based on the experiences of two veteran linguistic fieldworkers and advice from more than a twenty active fieldwork researchers, this handbook provides an encyclopedic review of current publications on linguistic fieldwork and surveys past and present approaches and solutions to problems in the field, and the historical, political, and social variables correlating with fieldwork in different areas of the world. The discussion of the ethical dimensions of fieldwork, as well as what constitutes the “typical” linguistic fieldwork setting or consultant is explored from multiple perspectives relevant to fieldwork on every continent. Included is information omitted in most other texts on the subject such as the collection, representation, management, and methods of extracting grammatical information from discourse and conversational data as well as the relationship between questionnaire-based elicitation, text-based elicitation, and philology, and the need for combinations of these methods. The book is useful before, during and after linguistic field trips since it provides extensive practical macro and micro organization and planning fieldwork tips as well as a handy sketch of major typological features for use in linguistic analysis. Comprehensive references are provided at the end of each chapter as resources relevant to the reader's particular interests.

Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science

Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science PDF Author: Friederike Moltmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260435
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).

The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages

The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages PDF Author: Daniel Siddiqi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135181026X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 839

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages is a one-stop reference for linguists on those topics that come up the most frequently in the study of the languages of North America (including Mexico). This handbook compiles a list of contributors from across many different theories and at different stages of their careers, all of whom are well-known experts in North American languages. The volume comprises two distinct parts: the first surveys some of the phenomena most frequently discussed in the study of North American languages, and the second surveys some of the most frequently discussed language families of North America. The consistent goal of each contribution is to couch the content of the chapter in contemporary theory so that the information is maximally relevant and accessible for a wide range of audiences, including graduate students and young new scholars, and even senior scholars who are looking for a crash course in the topics. Empirically driven chapters provide fundamental knowledge needed to participate in contemporary theoretical discussions of these languages, making this handbook an indispensable resource for linguistics scholars.

A Dictionary of Skiri Pawnee

A Dictionary of Skiri Pawnee PDF Author: Douglas Richard Parks
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803220478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The volume comprises approximately 4,500 entries that represent the basic vocabulary of the Skiri language. To assist users, the introduction features a description of the Skiri sound system and an alphabet, as well as a short description of Skiri grammar that outlines the categories and constituent morphemes composing Skiri words. The first section of the dictionary presents entries arranged alphabetically by English glosses; the second section is arranged alphabetically by Skiri words and stems. Separate appendixes provide representative conjugations of Skiri verbs, a list of irregular verb roots, and charts of kinship terms."--BOOK JACKET.

Phonological Typology

Phonological Typology PDF Author: Matthew K. Gordon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191646350
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides an overview of phonological typology: the study of how sounds are distributed across the languages of the world and why they display these distributions and patterns. It examines major phonological phenomena such as phoneme inventories, syllable structure, phonological alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology, and investigates issues including how common certain types of sounds are cross-linguistically and why; how many languages differentiate questions and statements using intonation; which areas of the world tend to be associated with more complex tone distinctions; and the relationship between cross-linguistic and language-internal frequency. Data are drawn from existing typologies, from the results of a survey of various phonological patterns in the 100-language sample from the World Atlas of Language Structures, and from corpora of individual languages. Matthew Gordon analyses these data and explores the correlations between different - often superficially unrelated - phonological properties to gain insight into the driving forces behind these phenomena. He provides an overview of synchronic and diachronic explanations for the patterns observed and discusses how formal phonological theory has attempted to model the typological data. One of relatively few typological works devoted to phonology, this book will be a valuable resource for phonologists and phoneticians from advanced undergraduate level upwards, as well all those with an interest in language typology.