Studies in the Classification of Eastern Bantu Languages

Studies in the Classification of Eastern Bantu Languages PDF Author: Thomas J. Hinnebusch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa, Eastern
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Studies in the Classification of Eastern Bantu Languages

Studies in the Classification of Eastern Bantu Languages PDF Author: Thomas J. Hinnebusch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa, Eastern
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Different Slants on Grammaticalization

Different Slants on Grammaticalization PDF Author: Sylvie Hancil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027252815
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume on grammaticalization focuses on new theoretical and methodological challenges underpinning language change. It provides new approaches and insights deepening our understanding of the cognitive, pragmatic, and socio-cultural mechanisms that trigger the formation and the change of grammars. In this volume, grammaticalization is dealt with diachronically, synchronically and as a by-product of dialogic interaction. Another key feature of this book is language diversity; as it includes studies on language families ranging from Niger-Congo, Koreanic, Japonic, Sino-Tibetan to Germanic and Romance. The novel aspects of grammaticalization addressed are new slants on the fundamental debate about grammaticalization as expansion vs reduction; the grammatical formation of ideophones; the semantic domain of fear as a source and a trigger of grammatical change, and many other aspects of semantic and morphosyntactic development.

Bridging constructions

Bridging constructions PDF Author: Valérie Guérin
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101418
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Many descriptive grammars report the use of a linguistic pattern at the interface between discourse and syntax which is known generally as tail-head linkage. This volume takes an unprecedented look at this type of linkage across languages and shows that there exist three distinct variants, all subsumed under the hypernym bridging constructions. The chapters highlight the defining features of these constructions in the grammar and their functional properties in discourse. The volume reveals that: Bridging constructions consist of two clauses: a reference clause and a bridging clause. Across languages, bridging clauses can be subordinated clauses, reduced main clauses, or main clauses with continuation prosody.Bridging constructions have three variants: recapitulative linkage, summary linkage and mixed linkage. They differ in the formal makeup of the bridging clause.In discourse, the functions that bridging constructions fulfil depend on the text genres in which they appear and their position in the text.If a language uses more than one type of bridging construction, then each type has a distinct discourse function.Bridging constructions can be optional and purely stylistic or mandatory and serve a grammatical purpose.Although the difference between bridging constructions and clause repetition can be subtle, they maintain their own distinctive characteristics.

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa PDF Author: Rhiannon Stephens
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478024518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Diversity in African languages

Diversity in African languages PDF Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234704
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
Diversity in African Languages contains a selection of revised papers from the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Oregon. Most chapters focus on single languages, addressing diverse aspects of their phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, information structure, or historical development. These chapters represent nine different genera: Mande, Gur, Kwa, Edoid, Bantu, Nilotic, Gumuzic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Other chapters investigate a mix of languages and families, moving from typological issues to sociolinguistic and inter-ethnic factors that affect language and accent switching. Some chapters are primarily descriptive, while others push forward the theoretical understanding of tone, semantic problems, discourse related structures, and other linguistic systems. The papers on Bantu languages reflect something of the internal richness and continued fascination of the family for linguists, as well as maturation of research on the family. The distribution of other papers highlights the need for intensified research into all the language families of Africa, including basic documentation, in order to comprehend linguistic diversities and convergences across the continent. In this regard, the chapter on Daats’íin (Gumuzic) stands out as the first-ever published article on this hitherto unknown and endangered language found in the Ethiopian-Sudanese border lands.

The Gogo

The Gogo PDF Author: Mathius E. Mnyampala
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317456556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A reconstruction of the history and customs of the Gogo people of Africa, based in part on oral histories, tribal legends and myths. This work was first published in Swahili in 1954 and was sponsored by the British Colonial government in an attempt to promote "tribal" cohesion.

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African languages
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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East Benue-Congo

East Benue-Congo PDF Author: John R. Watters
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101000
Category : Benue-Congo languages
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This volume is the first in what hopefully will be a growing set of edited volumes and monographs concerning Niger-Congo comparative studies. This first volume addresses matters that are relevant to the entire East Benue-Congo family as well as the particular branches Kainji, Plateau, and Bantoid. In the case of Bantoid, the particular focus is on Grassfields and the Grassfields-Bantu borderland, though other Bantoid subgroups are referenced. The potential topics for comparative studies among these languages are numerous, but this volume is dedicated to presentations on nominal affixes, third person pronouns, and verbal extensions. A forthcoming volume will provide some results of reconstructions and lexicostatistics in Cross River, exploratory reconstructions in Southern Jukunoid, and reconstructions in Ekoid-Mbe and Mambiloid.

Custodians of the Land

Custodians of the Land PDF Author: Gregory H. Maddox
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821440055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Farming and pastoral societies inhabit ever-changing environments. This relationship between environment and rural culture, politics and economy in Tanzania is the subject of this volume which will be valuable in reopening debates on Tanzanian history. In his conclusion, Isaria N. Kimambo, a founding father of Tanzanian history, reflects on the efforts of successive historians to strike a balance between external causes of change and local initiative in their interpretations of Tanzanian history. He shows that nationalist and Marxist historians of Tanzanian history, understandably preoccupied through the first quarter-century of the country’s post-colonial history with the impact of imperialism and capitalism on East Africa, tended to overlook the initiatives taken by rural societies to transform themselves. Yet there is good reason for historians to think about the causes of change and innovation in the rural communities of Tanzania, because farming and pastoral people have constantly changed as they adjusted to shifting environmental conditions.

Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory

Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Phonetics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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