The Papuan Languages of New Guinea

The Papuan Languages of New Guinea PDF Author: William A. Foley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521286213
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea provide an accessible account of one of the richest and most diverse linguistic situations in the world. The Papuan languages number over 700 (or 20 per cent of the world's total) in more than sixty language families. Less than a quarter of the individual languages have yet been adequately documented, and in this sense William Foley's book might be considered premature. However, in the search for language universals and generalisations in linguistic typology, it would be foolhardy to neglect the information that is available. In this respect alone, the present volume, systematically organised on mainly typology principles, is particularly timely and useful. In addition, the processes of linguistic diffusion are present in New Guinea to an extent probably paralleled elsewhere on the globe. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea will be of interest not only to general and comparative linguists and to typologists, but also to sociolinguists and anthropologists for the information it provides on the social dynamics of language content.

The Papuan Languages of New Guinea

The Papuan Languages of New Guinea PDF Author: William A. Foley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521286213
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
This introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea provide an accessible account of one of the richest and most diverse linguistic situations in the world. The Papuan languages number over 700 (or 20 per cent of the world's total) in more than sixty language families. Less than a quarter of the individual languages have yet been adequately documented, and in this sense William Foley's book might be considered premature. However, in the search for language universals and generalisations in linguistic typology, it would be foolhardy to neglect the information that is available. In this respect alone, the present volume, systematically organised on mainly typology principles, is particularly timely and useful. In addition, the processes of linguistic diffusion are present in New Guinea to an extent probably paralleled elsewhere on the globe. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea will be of interest not only to general and comparative linguists and to typologists, but also to sociolinguists and anthropologists for the information it provides on the social dynamics of language content.

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area PDF Author: Bill Palmer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110295253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1036

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Book Description
The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.

A grammar of Papuan Malay

A grammar of Papuan Malay PDF Author: Angela Kluge
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 394467586X
Category : Indonesia
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
This book presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on sixteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers. ‘Papuan Malay’ refers to the easternmost varieties of Malay (Austronesian). They are spoken in the coastal areas of West Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea. The variety described here is spoken along West Papua’s northeast coast. Papuan Malay is the language of wider communication and the first or second language for an ever-increasing number of people of the area. While Papuan Malay is not officially recognized and therefore not used in formal government or educational settings or for religious preaching, it is used in all other domains, including unofficial use in formal settings, and, to some extent, in the public media. After a general introduction to the language, its setting, and history, this grammar discusses the following topics, building up from smaller grammatical constituents to larger ones: phonology, word formation, noun and prepositional phrases, verbal and nonverbal clauses, non-declarative clauses, and conjunctions and constituent combining. Of special interest to linguists, typologists, and Malay specialists are the following in-depth analyses and descriptions: affixation and its productivity across domains of language choice, reduplication and its gesamtbedeutung, personal pronouns and their adnominal uses, demonstratives and locatives and their extended uses, and adnominal possessive relations and their non- canonical uses. This study provides a point of comparison for further studies in other (Papuan) Malay varieties and a starting point for Papuan Malay language development efforts.

Hua, a Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea

Hua, a Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea PDF Author: John Haiman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027230048
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
There is no country in the world where as many different languages are spoken as in New Guinea, approximately a fifth of the languages in the world. Most of these so-called Papuan languages seem to be unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere. The present work is the first truly comprehensive study of such a language, Hua. The chief typological peculiarity of Hua is the existence of a 'medial verb'construction used to conjoin clauses in compound and complex sentences. Hua also shows a fundamental morphological distinction between coordinate and subordinate medial clauses, the latter are not 'tense-iconic', the events they describe are not necessarily prior to the event described in later clauses. Moreover their truth is always presupposed. The distribution and behaviour of a post-nominal suffix - mo provides insights into the nature of topics, conditional clauses, and functional definitions of the parts of speech. In phonology, the central rules of assimilation are constrained by the universal hierarchy of sonority, which may, however, be derived from binary features. These are some of the areas in which the grammar of Hua is unusually perspicuous. The present work aims at a standard of completeness such that it would be a useful reference work for research in almost any theoretical topic.

A Grammar of Nungon

A Grammar of Nungon PDF Author: Hannah Sarvasy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004340106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
A Grammar of Nungon is the most comprehensive modern reference grammar of a language of northeast Papua New Guinea. Nungon is a previously-undescribed Finisterre-Huon Papuan language spoken by about 1,000 people in the Saruwaged Mountains, Morobe Province. Hannah Sarvasy provides a rich description of the language in its cultural context, based on original immersion fieldwork. The exposition is extraordinarily thorough, covering phonetics, phonology, word classes, morphology, grammatical relations, switch-reference, valency, complex predicates, clause combining, possession, information structure, and the pragmatics of communication. Four complete interlinearized Nungon monologues and dialogues supplement the copious textual examples. A Grammar of Nungon sets a new standard of thoroughness for reference works on languages of this region.

A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap

A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap PDF Author: Don Kulick
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 150151220X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Tayap is a small, previously undocumented Papuan language, spoken in a single village called Gapun, in the lower Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The language is an isolate, unrelated to any other in the area. Furthermore, Tayap is dying. Fewer than fifty speakers actively command it today. Based on linguistic anthropological work conducted over the course of thirty years, this book describes the grammar of the language, detailing its phonology, morphology and syntax. It devotes particular attention to verbs, which are the most elaborated area of the grammar, and which are complex, fusional and massively suppletive.The book also provides a full Tayap-English-Tok Pisin dictionary. A particularly innovative contribution is the detailed discussions of how Tayap’'s grammar is dissolving in the language of young speakers. The book exemplifies how the complex structures in fluent speakers’ Tayap are reduced or reanalyzed by younger speakers. This grammar and dictionary should therefore be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the mechanics of how languages disappear. The fact that it is the sole documentation of this unique Papuan language should also make it of interest to areal specialists and language typologists.

Pacific Languages

Pacific Languages PDF Author: John Lynch
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824842588
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Almost one-quarter of the world's languages are (or were) spoken in the Pacific, making it linguistically the most complex region in the world. Although numerous technical books on groups of Pacific or Australian languages have been published, and descriptions of individual languages are available, until now there has been no single book that attempts a wide regional coverage for a general audience. Pacific Languages introduces readers to the grammatical features of Oceanic, Papuan, and Australian languages as well as to the semantic structures of these languages. For readers without a formal linguistic background, a brief introduction to descriptive linguistics is provided. In addition to describing the structure of Pacific languages, this volume places them in their historical and geographical context, discusses the linguistic evidence for the settlement of the Pacific, and speculates on the reason for the region's many languages. It devotes considerable attention to the effects of contact between speakers of different languages and to the development of pidgin and creole languages in the Pacific. Throughout, technical language is kept to a minimum without oversimplifying the concepts or the issues involved. A glossary of technical terms, maps, and diagrams help identify a language geographically or genetically; reading lists and a language index guide the researcher interested in a particular language or group to other sources of information. Here at last is a clear and straightforward overview of Pacific languages for linguists and anyone interested in the history of sociology of the Pacific.

The Yimas Language of New Guinea

The Yimas Language of New Guinea PDF Author: William A. Foley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804715829
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
A "study of the Yimas language, its grammar and lexicon, the social and cultural contexts of the use of the language, its history and genetic relations, and its interactions with neighbouring languages." -- Pref.

Papuan Languages of Oceania

Papuan Languages of Oceania PDF Author: Stephen Adolphe Wurm
Publisher: Barrie Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description


A Grammar of Yélî Dnye

A Grammar of Yélî Dnye PDF Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733854
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic ‘rara’ suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: "This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities." Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara