The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
Spoken only in a cul-de-sac valley in Dogon country in east-central Mali, Bangime is the most enigmatic language isolate in the whole of interior West Africa. It is apparently a Basque-like survival of a formerly widespread language family, now boxed into this small valley by the expansion of Niger-Congo languages (Dogon, Bozo, Mande) on all sides. This book brings out the full glory of its grammar, especially its 3-level tone system.
This posthumous work by Jacques Arends offers new insights into the emergence of the creole languages of Suriname including Sranantongo or Suriname Plantation Creole, Ndyuka, and Saramaccan, and the sociohistorical context in which they developed. Drawing on a wealth of sources including little known historical texts, the author points out the relevance of European settlements prior to colonization by the English in 1651 and concludes that the formation of the Surinamese creoles goes back further than generally assumed. He provides an all-encompassing sociolinguistic overview of the colony up to the mid-19th century and shows how ethnicity, language attitude, religion and location had an effect on which languages were spoken by whom. The author discusses creole data gleaned from the earliest sources and interprets the attested variation. The book is completed by annotated textual data, both oral and written and representing different genres and stages of the Surinamese creoles. It will be of interest to linguists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and anyone interested in Suriname.
Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.
With over half the languages of the world currently in danger of extinction within a century, the need for high quality grammatical descriptions is more urgent than ever. Potential grammar writers, however, often find themselves paralyzed by the daunting task of describing a language. The papers in the present volume (originally published in Studies in Language 30:2 (2006)) provide suggestions and encouragement – from experienced grammar writers and users – regarding concrete methods for approaching the task of writing a descriptive grammar of a language. Salient "themes" emerging from the papers in this volume include: The necessity of community involvement in grammatical descriptions; The link between a grammar and the other products of a program of language documentation (a dictionary and collection of texts); The complementary functions of elicited vs. naturally occurring data; and grammatical description as 'art' as well as 'science'.
Jan G. van der Watt analyses in detail the ethics of John's letters against their respective socio-historical backgrounds. He then compares the ethics of the Gospel and Letters, showing that the basic core narrative overlaps in these writings, althoiugh some ethical matrial is applied in different ways to different situations. A rich ethical landscape is revealed, addressing issues like the importance ofinterpersonal relations, which results in co-operation through mutual love. The author shows that the focus in 1 John is pastoral, aiming at convincing the addressees not to be deceived by their schismatics but to strengthen their relationships with the eyewitness group. In 2 John, advice is given about visitors who threaten the church with false teachings, while 3 John deals with a conflict about receiving travelling missionaries. In both cases ethical guidelines are given which aim at protecting the group. -- Volume 2 Dust-Jactet Inside front Flap.
Since its publication in 2008, A Grammar of the Hittite Language has been the definitive Hittite reference and teaching tool. This new edition brings Hoffner and Melchert’s essential work up to date, incorporating the dramatic progress achieved in the field over the past fifteen years. Heavily revised and expanded, the second edition recasts the discussion of topics to better serve the linguistically informed reader. A reorganized presentation of the synchronic facts makes them accessible to both Hittitologists and linguists interested in Hittite for historical or typological purposes. Part 1 provides a thorough overview of Hittite grammar that is grounded in abundant textual examples. Part 2 is a tutorial that guides students through a series of graded lessons with illustrative sentences for translation. The tutorial is keyed to the reference grammar and includes extensive updated notes. Taken together with Part 2: Tutorial, which guides students through a series of graded lessons keyed to this reference grammar, the work remains the most comprehensive and detailed Hittite grammar ever produced.
The contributions making up this volume in honor of Eloise Jelinek are written from a formalist perspective that deals with stereotypically functionalist questions about language. Jelinek's pioneering work in formalist syntax has shown that autonomous syntax need not exist in a vacuum. Her work has highlighted the importance of incorporating the effects of discourse and information structure on the syntactic representation. This book aims to invoke Jelinek's work either in substance or spirit. The focus is on Jelinek's influential Pronominal Argument Hypothesis as an "non-configurational" language; the influence of discourse-related interface phenomena on syntactic structure; the syntactic analysis of the grammaticalization; interactions between morphology, phonology and phonetics; and foundational issues about the link between formal grammar and function of language, as well as the methodological issues underlying the different approaches to linguistics.
