Systems of Nominal Classification

Systems of Nominal Classification PDF Author: Gunter Senft
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521770750
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
A major linguistic study of nominal classification systems across a variety of languages, first published in 2000.

Systems of Nominal Classification

Systems of Nominal Classification PDF Author: Gunter Senft
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521770750
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
A major linguistic study of nominal classification systems across a variety of languages, first published in 2000.

The Diachrony of Classification Systems

The Diachrony of Classification Systems PDF Author: William B. McGregor
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264139
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Classification is a popular topic in typological, descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This volume is the first to deal specifically with the diachrony of linguistic systems of classification. It comprises original papers that examine the ways in which linguistic classification systems arise, change, and dissipate in both natural circumstances and in circumstances of attrition. The role of diffusion in such processes is explored, as well as the question of what can be diffused. The volume is not restricted to nominal systems of classification, but also includes papers dealing with the less well-known phenomenon of verbal classification. Languages from a wide spread of world regions are examined, including Africa, Amazonia, Australia, Eurasia, Oceania, and Mesoamerica. The volume will be of interest to linguistic typologists, descriptive linguists, historical linguists, and grammaticalization theorists.

Nominal Classification

Nominal Classification PDF Author: Marcin Kilarski
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270902
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages, the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon, grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result, the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure, the diverse functions of grammatical categories, linguistic complexity, agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier, supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.

Classifiers

Classifiers PDF Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191543985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

Numeral Classifier Systems

Numeral Classifier Systems PDF Author: Pamela Downing
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027226148
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Numeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system, its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts. Interestingly, although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure, this study reports that in actual usage, the semantic role of classifiers is slight — only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear, however, that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons, the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar, and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I PDF Author: Francesca Di Garbo
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101787
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia

The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia PDF Author: N. J. Enfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108758401
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fascinating and complex cultural and linguistic areas in the world. This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems and subsystems of the languages of this fascinating region. Drawing on his depth of expertise in mainland Southeast Asia, Enfield includes more than a thousand data examples from over a hundred languages from Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, bringing together a wealth of data and analysis that has not previously been available in one place. Chapters cover the many ways in which these languages both resemble each other, and differ from each other, and the diversity of the area's languages is highlighted, with a special emphasis on minority languages, which outnumber the national languages by nearly a hundred to one. The result is an authoritative treatment of a fascinating and important linguistic area.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics PDF Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199738637
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1366

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Book Description
With 49 chapters written by experts in the field, this reference volume authoritatively covers cognitive linguistics, from basic concepts and models to practical applications.

The Universal Structure of Categories

The Universal Structure of Categories PDF Author: Martina Wiltschko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992627
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Using data from a variety of languages such as Blackfoot, Halkomelem, and Upper Austrian German, this book explores a range of grammatical categories and constructions, including tense, aspect, subjunctive, case and demonstratives. It presents a new theory of grammatical categories - the Universal Spine Hypothesis - and reinforces generative notions of Universal Grammar while accommodating insights from linguistic typology. In essence, this new theory shows that language-specific categories are built from a small set of universal categories and language-specific units of language. Throughout the book the Universal Spine Hypothesis is compared to two alternative theories - the Universal Base Hypothesis and the No Base Hypothesis. This valuable addition to the field will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in linguistics.

Verb Classification in Australian Languages

Verb Classification in Australian Languages PDF Author: William B. McGregor
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110870878
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This book deals with systems of verb classification in Australian Aboriginal languages, with particular focus on languages of the north-west. It proposes a typology of the systems according to their main formal and semantic characteristics. It also makes some proposals concerning the historical origins and grammaticisation of these systems, and suggestions regarding the grammatical relations involved. In addition, an attempt is made to situate the phenomenon of verb classification within the context of related verbal phenomena such as serial verb constructions, nominal incorporation, and complex predicates.