Author: David Beck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110238233
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 872
Get Book
Book Description
The Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary represents to-date the most extensive collection of lexical material for any member of the Totonac-Tepehua family and the only such record for this previously-undescribed polysynthetic language, currently spoken in two principal dialects by some 3,400 people, mainly adults, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. As well as a short grammatical sketch, the dictionary comprises 9,000 lexical entries, including numerous fixed expressions, idioms, and ideophones; each lexical entry is accompanied by part-of-speech information and phonetic transcriptions as well as, where appropriate, dialectal information, grammatical notes (including plurals and classifiers for nouns), literal morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, example sentences, and cross-references to derived forms and semantically-related words. The accompanying DVD includes additional illustrative sentences, audio recordings of headwords and examples, and interlinear glosses for many of the sentences included in lexical entries. This book is the first Totonacan dictionary to be structured for the academic linguist, with special attention paid to the morphological structure of words and the organization of the Totonacan lexicon. Glosses are constructed so as to reflect the underlying complement-structure of words, with careful indication of the number of arguments required by particular lexical items, and all verbs are classified by dynamicity and valency. This dictionary is of interest to linguists working on American indigenous languages, as well as those concerned with the structure of morphologically complex words and the role of derivation in the lexicon of polysynthetic languages. It is also of use to historical linguists and Mesoamericanists interested in the reconstruction of the pre-Columbian history and ethnogeography of Mexico.
Author: David Beck
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Julia Nintemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110672642
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 568
Get Book
Book Description
As a follow-up study to the global comparison of spatial interrogatives (Studia Typologica 20), the present book examines the spatial declarative counterparts which are provided by the expression class of spatial deictic adverbs. In a functionally motivated typological approach, equivalents of Early Modern English here – hither – hence and there – thither – thence are identified across a sample of 250 languages from all macro-areas. These are also quantitatively assessed to extrapolate areal and global trends of coding patterns. The formal relationships between spatial interrogative and spatial declarative paradigms are analyzed with a focus on the syncretism of categories and of individual cells. Qualitative discussions of patterns precede in-depth treatments of problematic cases and other relevant issues related to the research topic. The quantitative results strongly point to areal linguistic trends concerning the distribution of distinct and non-distinct coding of the three spatial relations Place, Goal, and Source. Additional aspects such as quantitative evaluations of constructional complexity are addressed subsequently.
Author: David Beck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136069143
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Get Book
Book Description
This book presents rigorous and criterial definitions of the major parts of speech - noun, verb, and adjective - that account both for their syntactic behaviour and for their observed typological variation. Based on an examination of languages from five different groups - Salishan, Cora, Quechua, Totonac, and Hausa - this book argues that parts of speech must be defined by combining the criteria of syntactic markedness, which characterizes lexical classes in terms of unmarked syntactic roles, and semantic prototypicality, which delimits their prototypical meanings. Adjectives are shown to be the marked (and, hence, most variable) class because of their inherent non-iconicity at the semantics/syntax interface. The four-member typology of parts of speech systems (languages with three open classes, those that group adjectives with verbs, those that group adjectives with nouns, and those that conflate all three) current in the literature is easily generated by free recombination of these two criterial features. Closer examination of the data, however, casts doubt on the existence of one of the four possible language-types, the noun-adjective conflating inventory, which is accounted here for by replacing free recombination of semantic and syntactic features with an algorithm for the subdivision of the lexicon that gives primacy to semantics over syntax.
Author: Fernando Zuniga
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730952
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1100
Get Book
Book Description
This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).
Author: Alexandra Aikhenvald
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004194673
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Get Book
Book Description
This book surveys multi-verb constructions in multiple languages from the Americas, showing a very rich tapestry of typologically unusual constructions, including serial verbs, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs. Where possible, a diachronic perspectrive is offered.
Author: Martin Thiering
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110356872
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book
Book Description
This book presents novel data from endangered languages and cultures that are ever so often still not focused on. It combines different disciplines to capture the intricacies of spatial orientation and navigation. Also, the interplay between culture through language and practices presents new insights in the importance of combining cognitive semantics with cognitive anthropology.
Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199859
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Get Book
Book Description
A cross-linguistic study of how objects are affected by information structure.
Author: Leo Wanner
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292779
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Get Book
Book Description
The Meaning Text Theory (MTT) is a lexicon-centred and dependency-based theory for the description of language using a holistic model that incorporates semantics, syntax, morphology and lexis. This volume, prepared on the occasion of Igor Mel'čuk’s 70th birthday, offers a cross-section of the current advances in MTT and its applications. The first part of the book focuses on lexical phenomena that are still largely neglected in mainstream linguistics: sound symbolism as manifested by ideophones, and idiosyncratic lexical relations as manifested by lexical functions (LFs). In particular, LFs are addressed from different angles (including the introduction of new “standard” LFs, the argument structure and semantic decomposition of lexical relations captured by LFs, automatic recognition of LF-instances in corpora, and the use of LFs in terminology and natural language processing). The second part of the book deals with such prominent model-oriented issues as semantic paraphrasing in MTT, the role of phrase structure in MTT and syntactic analysis within MTT.
Author: Antoine Guillaume
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110692120
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 702
Get Book
Book Description
This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world’s languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.
