The Cangin Languages

The Cangin Languages PDF Author: John T. M. Merrill
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004546499
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Cangin languages of Senegal remained hidden from linguists for years, and have only recently been seriously documented. This book traces the history of the Cangin languages, and presents a reconstruction of Proto-Cangin through careful application of historical linguistic methods. This is one of few in-depth historical treatments of a West African language family, and takes into account all existing sources, including previously unpublished data from my own work on Noon. The reconstruction of Proto-Cangin reveals a number of important features now obscured in the modern languages, including a surprisingly rich inventory of noun class prefixes, which are of great importance to the study of the world’s largest language family, Niger-Congo. Included is a catalogue of over 600 Proto-Cangin reconstructions.

The Cangin Languages

The Cangin Languages PDF Author: John Thomas Mayfield Merrill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789004520028
Category : Cangin languages
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book traces the history of the Cangin languages of Senegal, and presents a reconstruction of Proto-Cangin through careful application of historical linguistic methods, helping to understand the history of Niger-Congo, the world's largest language family

The Cangin Languages

The Cangin Languages PDF Author: John T. M. Merrill
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004546499
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Cangin languages of Senegal remained hidden from linguists for years, and have only recently been seriously documented. This book traces the history of the Cangin languages, and presents a reconstruction of Proto-Cangin through careful application of historical linguistic methods. This is one of few in-depth historical treatments of a West African language family, and takes into account all existing sources, including previously unpublished data from my own work on Noon. The reconstruction of Proto-Cangin reveals a number of important features now obscured in the modern languages, including a surprisingly rich inventory of noun class prefixes, which are of great importance to the study of the world’s largest language family, Niger-Congo. Included is a catalogue of over 600 Proto-Cangin reconstructions.

Changing Minds Changing Tools

Changing Minds Changing Tools PDF Author: Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262037866
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition—often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms—is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in domain-general learning theory as it relates to language acquisition, Kapatsinski argues that the way minds change as a result of experience can help explain how languages change over time and can predict the likely directions of language change—which in turn predicts what kinds of structures we find in the languages of the world. What we know about how we learn (the core question of learning theory) can help us understand why languages are the way they are (the core question of theoretical linguistics). Taking a dynamic, usage-based perspective, Kapatsinski focuses on diachronic universals, recurrent pathways of language change, rather than synchronic universals, properties that all languages share. Topics include associative approaches to learning and the neural implementation of the proposed mechanisms; selective attention; units of language; a comparison of associative and Bayesian approaches to learning; representation in the mind of visual and auditory experience; the production of new words and new forms of words; and automatization of repeated action sequences. This approach brings us closer to understanding why languages are the way they are, Kapatsinski contends, than approaches premised on innate knowledge of language universals and the language acquisition device.

The Changing Languages of Europe

The Changing Languages of Europe PDF Author: Bernd Heine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199297339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
"Professor Heine and Professor Kuteva look for the causes of linguistic change in cultural and economic exchanges across national and regional boundaries and in the processes that occur when speakers learn or are in close contact with another language. Testing their data and conclusions against findings from elsewhere in the world, the authors reconstruct and reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will, they argue, transform the linguistic landscape of Europe." "The book is written in clear, non-technical language. It will appeal to scholars and students of language change and variation in Europe and elsewhere. It will also interest everyone concerned to understand the nature of language and language change."--BOOK JACKET.

The Cangin Group

The Cangin Group PDF Author: W. J. Pichl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cangin languages
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description


The Changing Languages of Guangxi, Southern China

The Changing Languages of Guangxi, Southern China PDF Author: Yang Huang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793630100
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Based on a case study of the evolution of “finish” morphemes in Yue and Zhuang Tai-Kadai, this book examines how an internal factor (grammaticalization) and an external factor (language contact) interacted to produce the polyfunctionality of the specific “finish” morphemes in the languages of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Southern China. Arguing that the Central Southern Guangxi Region is a micro-linguistic area, Huang also introduces five unique areal features shared by many of its languages.

The Changing Language of Modern English Drama 1945–2005

The Changing Language of Modern English Drama 1945–2005 PDF Author: K. Dorney
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230245218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
An account of language and drama between 1945 and 2005, synthesizing linguistic and dramatic knowledge in order to illuminate the ways in which anxieties and attitudes toward language manifest themselves in discourses on and around English theatre of the time, and how these anxieties and attitudes reflect back through the theatre of this period.

The Changing Language Roles and Linguistic Identities of the Kashmiri Speech Community

The Changing Language Roles and Linguistic Identities of the Kashmiri Speech Community PDF Author: M. Ashraf Bhat
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862606
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book operates from the premise that linguistic identities are important because they make sense to people, are meaningful, and have an impact on the thinking and behaviour of individuals and groups, both overtly and covertly. The framework outlined here synthesises key works on linguistic identity and draws together insights from a range of disciplines, such as sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, cognitive sciences, and social psychology. It investigates linguistic assertions of community identity in the multilingual context of the Kashmir region in India, by studying the dimensions of changing language roles and linguistic practices in relation to the process of creating and maintaining new linguistic identities under different circumstances. It examines the nature of changing language roles as a combination of several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, which include script uncertainty, interlingual diglossia, language attrition, language policies of the state, collective attitudes towards language(s), corresponding speech communities, intergenerational transmission, and instrumental orientation, among others. It demonstrates that changes in role are principally motivated by various factors, which may lead to the demise of the distinct symbol and roots of the Kashmiri linguistic-cultural identity in favour of the non-native code, Urdu, which could emerge as the primary linguistic identity in the near future.

A Descriptive Grammar of Noon

A Descriptive Grammar of Noon PDF Author: Maria Soukka
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cangin languages
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Noon is a West-Atlantic language of the Cangin subgroup, spoken by 25 000 people in central Senegal, in and around the town of Thies. The aim of this study is to provide a full grammatical description of Noon, since no such study has been done on the language. We have not followed a specific linguistic model as framework, but rather tried to work from the classical approach of presenting the structures in the grammatical units of the language, from morphology to discourse, All analysis is presented with language examples from data collected in the Thies area over the years 1994-1998. The study is divided into 11 chapters, followed by a short interlinearised text sample with a free translation. The first chapter presents a brief overview of the phonology and the morphophonological processes that take place in affixation. Another important feature described in this section is the restricted regressive vowel harmony process, based on the ATR feature. In chapters 2-3, the nominal system is described, including the noun class system of 6 basic classes with which most nominals are in agreement. There is also a threefold locative distinction present in determined nominals. This locative distinction is further elaborated in the demonstratives. Chapter 4 treats prepositions and adverbs. In chapters 5-6, verbal morphology and the verb phrase are presented, A major feature of the Noon verb is the derivational affixation which, apart from carrying aspectual information, also has bearing on the valency of the verb. The conjugational system is based on affixation, but also on the use of auxiliaries and particles. Chapter 7 deals with conjunctions, particles and interjections, and chapter 8 treats clause structures: independent ones, both verbal and non-verbal, but also dependent clauses. In chapter 9, different simple sentence types are described, followed by the complex sentences, including serial and reduplicative types. Chapter 10 depicts some important features that occur on the discourse level such as the wider use of spatial deixis in temporal and textual references. Finally, in chapter 11 is presented a comparative view of some of the major dialect differences in Noon.

Language Rights in a Changing China

Language Rights in a Changing China PDF Author: Alexandra Grey
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512552
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice. Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy. The book refines Grey’s award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Joshua A. Fishman Award in 2018. The judges said the study “decenter[s] all types of sociolinguistic assumptions." It is a thought-provoking work on minority rights and language politics, relevant beyond China.