The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia PDF Author: R.M.W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199270678
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
R. M. W. Dixon, author of acclaimed grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages and Fijian, here describes the hauntingly complex structure of Jarawara, spoken by just 170 Indians. Professor Dixon shared their daily lives, deep in the Amazonian jungle, during seven field trips. He explains how their unusual language reflects their environment and their mental attitudes: for example, when someone describes something that has happened the grammar obliges that person to state whether or not he or she saw it happen. His account brings to life the culture of this tribe of slash-and-burn agriculturalists.

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia PDF Author: R.M.W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199270678
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 661

Get Book Here

Book Description
R. M. W. Dixon, author of acclaimed grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages and Fijian, here describes the hauntingly complex structure of Jarawara, spoken by just 170 Indians. Professor Dixon shared their daily lives, deep in the Amazonian jungle, during seven field trips. He explains how their unusual language reflects their environment and their mental attitudes: for example, when someone describes something that has happened the grammar obliges that person to state whether or not he or she saw it happen. His account brings to life the culture of this tribe of slash-and-burn agriculturalists.

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia PDF Author: Robert M. W. Dixon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia

The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia PDF Author: R.M.W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199270678
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 661

Get Book Here

Book Description
R. M. W. Dixon, author of acclaimed grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages and Fijian, here describes the hauntingly complex structure of Jarawara, spoken by just 170 Indians. Professor Dixon shared their daily lives, deep in the Amazonian jungle, during seven field trips. He explains how their unusual language reflects their environment and their mental attitudes: for example, when someone describes something that has happened the grammar obliges that person to state whether or not he or she saw it happen. His account brings to life the culture of this tribe of slash-and-burn agriculturalists.

HANDBOOK AMAZONIAN LANGUAGES

HANDBOOK AMAZONIAN LANGUAGES PDF Author: Desmond C. Derbyshire
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110822121
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "HANDBOOK AMAZONIAN LANGUAGES".

The Languages of the Amazon

The Languages of the Amazon PDF Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191007994
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This is the first guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia, which include some of the most the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction. Alexandra Aikhenvald, one of the world's leading experts on the region, provides an account of the more than 300 languages. She sets out their main characteristics, compares their common and unique features, and describes the histories and cultures of the people who speak them. The languages abound in rare features. Most have been in contact with each other for many generations, giving rise to complex patterns of linguistic influence. The author draws on her own extensive field research to tease out and analyse the patterns of their genetic and structural diversity. She shows how these patterns reveal the interrelatedness of language and culture; different kinship systems, for example, have different linguistic correlates. Professor Aikhenvald explains the many unusual features of Amazonian languages, which include evidentials, tones, classifiers, and elaborate positional verbs. She ends the book with a glossary of terms, and a full guide for those readers interested in following up a particular language or linguistic phenomenon. The book is free of esoteric terminology, written in its author's characteristically clear style, and brought vividly to life with numerous accounts of her experience in the region. It may be used as a resource in courses in Latin American studies, Amazonian studies, linguistic typology, and general linguistics, and as reference for linguistic and anthropological research.

The Amazonian Languages

The Amazonian Languages PDF Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521570213
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
The Amazon Basin is arguably both one of the least-known and the most complex linguistic regions in the world. It is the home of some 300 languages belonging to around twenty language families, plus more than a dozen genetic isolates, and many of these languages (often incompletely documented and mostly endangered) show properties that constitute exceptions to received ideas about linguistic universals. This book provides an overview in a single volume of this rich and exciting linguistic area. The editors and contributors have sought to make their descriptions as clear and accessible as possible, in order to provide a basis for further research on the structural characteristics of Amazonian languages and their genetic and areal relationships, as well as a point of entry to important cross-linguistic data for the wider constituency of theoretical linguists.

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World

Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World PDF Author: Simone Mattiola
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262586
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

Languages of the Amazon

Languages of the Amazon PDF Author: Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199593566
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
This guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia includes some of the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction.

The Native Languages of South America

The Native Languages of South America PDF Author: Loretta O'Connor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107044286
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis PDF Author: Michael Fortescue
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199683204
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1089

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Book Description
This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.