Ute Reference Grammar

Ute Reference Grammar PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ute language
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description

Ute Reference Grammar

Ute Reference Grammar PDF Author: Talmy Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027202842
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ute is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch, currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America, Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically, Ute offers a cluster of intriguing features, best viewed from the perspective of diachronic change and grammaticalization. The book presents a comprehensive synchronic description of grammatical structures and their communicative functions, as well as a diachronic account of a grammar in the midst of change. The book is the first of a 3-volume series which also includes a collection of oral texts and a dictionary. Ute speakers and tribal members may find in the present volume a step-by-step description of how words are combined into meaningful communication. Linguists may find a detailed account of one language, an account that is unabashedly informed by universals of grammar, communication and change.

Ute Reference Grammar

Ute Reference Grammar PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ute language
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description


Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse

Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse PDF Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027230959
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday s division into ideational, textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar, and cover a wide range of areas, including aspect, argument structure, noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations, pronominal clitics, theme in relation to writing skills, discourse structures and markers, the role of attention in conversation, the functions of topic, phatic communion, subjectification, formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall, the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.

Ute Reference Grammar

Ute Reference Grammar PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287414
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ute is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch, currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America, Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically, Ute offers a cluster of intriguing features, best viewed from the perspective of diachronic change and grammaticalization. The book presents a comprehensive synchronic description of grammatical structures and their communicative functions, as well as a diachronic account of a grammar in the midst of change. The book is the first of a 3-volume series which also includes a collection of oral texts and a dictionary. Ute speakers and tribal members may find in the present volume a step-by-step description of how words are combined into meaningful communication. Linguists may find a detailed account of one language, an account that is unabashedly informed by universals of grammar, communication and change.

Ute Dictionary

Ute Dictionary PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268398
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description
This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute words is then given in the Ute-English part. The English-Ute part, next, serves primarily as a search-and-reference tool. A short section on traditional semantic-cultural fields follows. Ute is a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Numic sub-family. Together with its northern dialects (Southern Paiute, Uintah, White River), it should be considered a single language, Núuchi ("of the people") or Núu-'apaghapi ("the people's speech"). While our work was done primarily in the southern dialects (Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Uncompaghre), we have included as many words as could be safely extracted from Powel's and Smith's work on the northern dialects, as well as some from Sapir's work (1931) on Northern Ute, adjusting them to Southern-dialect pronunciation. This brings the work as close as one could hope, at this time, to a comprehensive all-Ute dictionary, a task that yet remains to be done. We have tried to emphasize in the Ute-English entries the historical and derivational connectivity of Ute vocabulary and its gradual growth and expansion. This is also underscored in the introductory chapter on word derivation. While this work remains incomplete, we hope it can be some day expanded into an all-inclusive Ute dictionary, and will help the people – Núuchiu – preserve their language and culture.

The Diachrony of Grammar

The Diachrony of Grammar PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268886
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 877

Get Book Here

Book Description
The case-studies assembled in these two volumes span a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. That is, into the rise and fall of syntactic constructions and their attendant grammatical morphology. While focused squarely on the data, the studies are nonetheless cast in an explicit theoretical perspective – adaptive, developmental, variationist. Taken as a whole, this work constitutes a frontal assault on Ferdinand de Saussure's corrosive legacy in linguistics. Over the years, reviewers slapped the author's wrist periodically for having dared to commit that most heinous of sins against de Saussure's hallowed legacy – panchronic grammar. In this work he pleads guilty, having never seen a piece of synchronic data that didn't reek, to high heaven, of the diachrony that gave it rise. Reek in two distinct ways: first with the frozen relics of the past that prompt us to reconstruct prior diachronic states; and second with the synchronic variation that hints at ongoing change. Conversely, the author confesses to having never seen a diachronic explanation that did not hinge on the synchronic principles – Carnap's general propositions – that govern language behavior. The synchrony and diachrony of grammar are twin faces of the same coin. To study one without the other is to gut both. By understanding how synchronic grammars come into being we also understand the cognitive, communicative, neurological and developmental universals that constrain diachronic change – and through it synchronic typology.

The Persistence of Language

The Persistence of Language PDF Author: Shannon T. Bischoff
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027272247
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited collection presents two sets of interdisciplinary conversations connecting theoretical, methodological, and ideological issues in the study of language. In the first section, Approaches to the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas, the authors connect historical, theoretical, and documentary linguistics to examine the crucial role of endangered language data for the development of biopsychological theory and to highlight how methodological decisions impact language revitalization efforts. Section two, Approaches to the study of voices and ideologies, connects anthropological and documentary linguistics to examine how discourses of language contact, endangerment, linguistic purism and racism shape scholarly practice and language policy and to underscore the need for linguists and laypersons alike to acquire the analytical tools to deconstruct discourses of inequality. Together, these chapters pay homage to the scholarship of Jane H. Hill, demonstrating how a critical, interdisciplinary linguistics narrows the gap between disparate fields of analysis to treat the ecology of language in its entirety.

Mind, Code and Context

Mind, Code and Context PDF Author: T. Givon
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317768019
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

Syntactic Complexity

Syntactic Complexity PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290148
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Get Book Here

Book Description
Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.

The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition

The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition PDF Author: Dan Isaac Slobin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134930933
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
See Volume I (0-89859-367-0) for full description and TOC.