Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas PDF Author: Bernard Comrie
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902720683X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas PDF Author: Bernard Comrie
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902720683X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.

Nominalization in Languages of the Americas

Nominalization in Languages of the Americas PDF Author: Roberto Zariquiey
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726273X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas, yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship, which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right, and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages, with focus on South America, examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions, their internal and external syntax, and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.

Relative Clause Structure in Mesoamerican Languages

Relative Clause Structure in Mesoamerican Languages PDF Author: Enrique L. Palancar
Publisher: Brill's Studies in the Indigen
ISBN: 9789004467750
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"As the first major survey of relative clause structure in the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, this volume comprises a collection of original, in-depth studies of relative constructions in representative languages from across Mexico and Central America, based on empirical data collected by the authors themselves. The studies not only reveal the complex and fascinating nature of relative clauses in the languages in question, but they also shed invaluable light on how Mesoamerica came to be one of the richest and most diverse linguistic areas on our planet. Contributors are: Eric Campbell, Claudine Chamoreau, Lucero Flores Nájera, Silviano Jiménez Jiménez, Óscar López Nicolás, Eladio (B'alam) Mateo Toledo, Enrique L. Palancar, and Roberto Zavala Maldonado"--

Subordination in Native South-American Languages

Subordination in Native South-American Languages PDF Author: Rik van Gijn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027206783
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session

Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages

Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages PDF Author: Ivano Caponigro
Publisher:
ISBN: 0197518370
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of varieties of headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families, all Mesoamerican languages spoken in Mexico and Guatemala and one Chibchan language spoken in Honduras. Headless relative clauses are clauses that often resemble interrogative clauses or headed relative clauses in their morpho-syntactic shape, but whose meaning brings them close to nominal constructions. For the vast majority of the languages in this volume, many of which are endangered and all of which are understudied, the work presented here represents the only published material on the subject.

The Syntax of Relative Clauses

The Syntax of Relative Clauses PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110884605X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Relative clauses play a hugely important role in analysing the structure of sentences. This book provides the first evidence that a unified analysis of the different types of relative clauses is possible - a step forward in our understanding. Using careful analyses of a wide range of languages, Cinque argues that the relative clause types can all be derived from a single, double-headed, structure. He also presents evidence that restrictive, maximalizing, ('integrated') non-restrictive, kind-defining, infinitival and participial RCs merge at different heights of the nominal extended projection. This book provides an elegant generalization about the structure of all relatives. Theoretically profound and empirically rich, it promises to radically alter the way we think about this subject for years to come.

Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World

Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World PDF Author: Hannah S. Sarvasy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192643118
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 881

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Book Description
The languages of the world make use of a variety of techniques for describing events and putting sentences together. This volume takes a typological approach to clause chaining, a fascinating feature of the grammar of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, East Africa, across Central Asia, and the Americas. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, and are used to organize discourse and to foreground or background events and participants; they often go together with switch-reference marking, an indication of whether upcoming subjects will be co-referential with preceding subjects or not. The introductory chapter features a discussion of the typological properties of clause chaining, with a brief overview of previous approaches to and investigations of clause chains followed by an overview of their recurrent grammatical features; it ends with an appendix featuring notes for fieldworkers. The first part of the book explores general issues in clause chaining, including prosody, acquisition, and language contact and history; later parts then examine clause chaining and related phenomena in a wide range of languages from around the world.

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America PDF Author: Carmen Dagostino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110600927
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

Typological Studies

Typological Studies PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317691245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In this book, Cinque takes a generative perspective on typological questions relating to word order and to the syntax of relative clauses. In particular, Cinque looks at: the position of the Head vis à vis the relative clause in relation to the position of the verb vis à vis his object; a general cross-linguistic analysis of correlatives; the need to distinguish a sentence-grammar, from a discourse-grammar, type of non-restrictives (with languages differing as to whether they possess both, one, the other, or neither); a selective type of extraction from relative clauses; and a tentative sketch of a more ample work in progress on a unified analysis of externally headed, internally headed, and headless relative clauses.

The Languages of Native North America

The Languages of Native North America PDF Author: Marianne Mithun
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107392802
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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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.