A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano)
A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano)

Author: Kristine Stenzel

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0803228228

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Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation This volume is the first descriptive grammar of Kotiria (Wanano), a member of the eastern Tukanoan language family spoken in the Vaupes River basin of Colombia and Brazil in the northwest Amazon rain forest. The Kotirias, who have lived in this remote region for more than seven hundred years, participate in the complex Vaupés social system, characterized by long-standing linguistic and cultural interaction. The Kotirias remained relatively isolated from the dominant societies until the early part of the twentieth century, when increasing outside influence in the region triggered rapid social and linguistic change. Today the Kotirias number only about sixteen hundred people, and their language, though still used in traditional communities, is in risk of becoming endangered. Kristine Stenzel draws on eight years of intensive work with the Kotirias to promote, record, and revitalize their language. Working with dozens of native speakers and drawing on numerous oral narratives and written texts, this book is the first comprehensive study of this endangered language and one of the few reference grammars of this language family.

A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano)
A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano)

Author: Kristine Stenzel

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 0803246498

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Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This is the first descriptive grammar of Kotiria (Wanano), a member of the Tukanoan language family spoken in the Vaupes River basin of Colombia and Brazil in the northwest Amazon rain forest. The Kotirias have lived in this remote region for more than seven hundred years and participate in the complex Vaupes social system characterized by longstanding linguistic and cultural interaction. The Kotirias remained relatively isolated from the dominant societies until the early part of the twentieth century, when the region began to experience increasing outside influence leading to processes of rapid social and linguistic change. Today the Kotirias number only about sixteen hundred people and their language, though still used in traditional communities, is rapidly becoming endangered. Kristine Stenzel draws on eight years of intensive work with the Kotirias to promote, record, and revitalize their language. Working with dozens of native speakers and drawing on numerous oral narratives and written texts, this book is the first comprehensive study of this endangered language and one of the few reference grammars of this language family.

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality
The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-18

Total Pages: 929

ISBN-13: 0191077402

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This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality
The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

Author: Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 929

ISBN-13: 0198759517

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The first volume to offer a thorough and systematic account of evidentiality and the expression of information source, Illustrated with extensive data from a range of typologically diverse languages, Introductory chapter offers practical advice for fieldworkers investigating evidentially, Interdisciplinary in nature with insights from typology, semantics, pragmatics, language description, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics Book jacket.

Nonverbal Predication in Amazonian Languages
Nonverbal Predication in Amazonian Languages

Author: Simon E. Overall

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-08-15

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9027264244

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This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data, generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages, it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand, it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other, it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages, which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights, either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions, or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview, and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.

Switch Reference 2.0
Switch Reference 2.0

Author: Rik van Gijn

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 9027266778

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Switch reference is a grammatical process that marks a referential relationship between arguments of two (or more) verbs. Typically it has been characterized as an inflection pattern on the verb itself, encoding identity or non-identity between subject arguments separately from traditional person or number marking. In the 50 years since William Jacobsen’s coinage of the term, switch reference has evolved from an exotic phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages to a widespread feature found in geographically and linguistically unconnected parts of the world. The growing body of information on the topic raises new theoretical and empirical questions about the development, functions, and nature of switch reference, as well as the internal variation between different switch-reference systems. The contributions to this volume discuss these and other questions for a wide variety of languages from all over the world, and endevaour to demonstrate the full functional and morphosyntactic range of the phenomenon.

A Grammar of Murui (Bue)
A Grammar of Murui (Bue)

Author: Katarzyna I. Wojtylak

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-12

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 9004432671

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In A Grammar of Murui (Bue), Katarzyna Wojtylak provides the first complete description of Murui, an endangered Witotoan language, spoken by the Murui-Muina (Witoto) people from Colombia and Peru. The grammar is written from a functional and typological perspective, using natural language data gathered during several fieldtrips to the Caquetá-Putumayo region between 2013 and 2017. The many remarkable characteristics of Murui include a complex system of classifiers, differential subject and object marking, person-marking verb morphology, evidential and epistemic marking, head-tail linkage, and a system of numerals, including the fraternal (brother-based) forms for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The grammar represents an important contribution to the study of Witotoan languages, linguistic typology of Northwest Amazonia, and language contact in the area.

Recursion across Domains
Recursion across Domains

Author: Luiz Amaral

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-07

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1108311164

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Recursion and self-embedding are at the heart of our ability to formulate our thoughts, articulate our imagination and share with other human beings. Nonetheless, controversy exists over the extent to which recursion is shared across all domains of syntax. A collection of 18 studies are presented here on the central linguistic property of recursion, examining a range of constructions in over a dozen languages representing great areal, typological and genetic diversity and spanning wide latitudes. The volume expands the topic to include prepositional phrases, possessives, adjectives, and relative clauses - our many vehicles to express creative thought - to provide a critical perspective on claims about how recursion connects to broader aspects of the mind. Parallel explorations across language families, literate and non-literate societies, children and adults are investigated and constitutes a new step in the generative tradition by simultaneously focusing on formal theory, acquisition and experimentation, and ecologically-sensitive fieldwork, and initiates a new community where these diverse experts collaborate.

Serial Verbs
Serial Verbs

Author: Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd

Publisher: Oxford Studies in Typology and

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0198791267

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This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate. It uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations.

Serial Verbs
Serial Verbs

Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0192508776

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This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.