Language Typology and Historical Contingency
Language Typology and Historical Contingency

Author: Balthasar Bickel

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 9027270805

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What is the range of diversity in linguistic types, what are the geographical distributions for the attested types, and what explanations, based on shared history or universals, can account for these distributions? This collection of articles by prominent scholars in typology seeks to address these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology. The phenomena considered range from the phonological to the morphosyntactic, the areal coverage ranges in scale from micro-areal to worldwide, and the types of historical contingency range from contact-based to genealogical in nature. Together, the papers argue strongly for a view in which, although they use distinct methodologies, linguistic typology and historical linguistics are one and the same enterprise directed at discovering how languages came to be the way they are and how linguistic types came to be distributed geographically as they are.

Language Typology and Historical Contingency
Language Typology and Historical Contingency

Author: Balthasar Bickel

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789027206855

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What is the range of diversity in linguistic types, what are the geographical distributions for the attested types, and what explanations, based on shared history or universals, can account for these distributions? This books addresses these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology.

Language Typology
Language Typology

Author: Joseph Greenberg

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010-12-14

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 311088643X

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“Greenberg’s survey of the earlier history of typology is without rivals, a must read for every linguist who is curious about the intellectual roots of current typology. This wouldn’t be a work by Greenberg if it didn’t go far beyond simple historiography, providing a highly original and readable framework for understanding the earlier efforts.” Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie

Language Typology 1987
Language Typology 1987

Author: Winfred P. Lehmann

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9027278318

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These papers from the 1987 Typology Symposium — a follow-up to the 1985 meeting in Moscow — deal with the relevance of typology for historical linguistics. Its application in understanding phonological and grammatical change is examined for a variety of languages. Its relevance for application of the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction is noted with reference to the glottalic theory and problems in other language families. Among the several approaches, alignment typology is especially examined, with languages defined as accusative, ergative or stative-active an approach to which linguists of the USSR have made important contributions in recent years.Among specific problems examined are tonogenesis in Na-Dene, the origin of the genitive in ergative languages, and relative pronouns of Indo-European languages in the context of the Eurasiatic hypothesis. Along with changes in other languages (like those of East and Southeast Asia), these problems are discussed in an effort to determine general and specific tendencies in language change, and to contribute towards the development of diachronic typology.

Linguistic Typology
Linguistic Typology

Author: Jae Jung Song

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 0199677093

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This textbook provides a critical introduction to major research topics and current approaches in linguistic typology. It draws on a wide range of cross-linguistic data to describe what linguistic typology has revealed about language in general and about the rich variety of ways in which meaning and expression are achieved in the world's languages.

Language Typology
Language Typology

Author: Alice Caffarel

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 9781588115591

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This book is intended as a systemic functional contribution to language typology both for those who would like to understand and describe particular languages against the background of generalizations about a wide range of languages and also for those who would like to develop typological accounts that are based on and embody descriptions of the systems of particular languages (rather than isolated constructions). The book is a unique contribution in at least two respects. On the one hand, it is the first book based on systemic functional theory that is specifically concerned with language typology. On the other hand, the book combines the particular with the general in the description of languages: it presents comparable sketches of particular languages while at the same time identifying generalizations based on the languages described here as well as on other languages. The volume explores eight languages, covering seven language families: French, German, Pitjantjatjara, Tagalog, Telugu, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese.

Valency over Time
Valency over Time

Author: Silvia Luraghi

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 3110755718

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Valency patterns and valency orientation have been frequent topics of research under different perspectives, often poorly connected. Diachronic studies on these topics is even less systematic than synchronic ones. The papers in this book bring together two strands of research on valency, i.e. the description of valency patterns as worked out in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project (ValPaL), and the assessment of a language's basic valency and its possible orientation. Notably, the ValPaL does not provide diachronic information concerning the valency patterns investigated: one of the aims of the book is to supplement the available data with data from historical stages of languages, in order to make it profitably exploitable for diachronic research. In addition, new research on the diachrony of basic valency and valency alternations can deepen our understanding of mechanisms of language change and of the propensity of languages or language families to exploit different constructional patterns related to transitivity.

The Sino-Tibetan Languages
The Sino-Tibetan Languages

Author: Graham Thurgood

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 1049

ISBN-13: 1315399490

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There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. There are overviews of the whole family on genetic classification and language contact, syntax and morphology, and also on word order typology. There are also more detailed overview articles on the phonology, morphosyntax, and writing system of just the Sinitic side of the family. Supplementing these overviews are articles on Shanghainese, Cantonese and Mandarin dialects. Tibeto-Burman is reviewed by genetic or geographical sub-group, with overview articles on some of the major groups and areas, and there are also detailed descriptions of 41 individual Tibeto-Burman languages, written by world experts in the field. Designed for students and researchers of Asian languages, The Sino-Tibetan Languages is a detailed overview of the field. This book is invaluable to language students, experts requiring concise, but thorough, information on related languages, and researchers working in historical, typological and comparative linguistics.

Theory and description in African Linguistics
Theory and description in African Linguistics

Author: Emily Clem

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 788

ISBN-13: 3961102058

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The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL.

A Grammar of Pangkhua
A Grammar of Pangkhua

Author: Zahid Akter

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-02

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 3111387674

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Pangkhua is an endangered Tibeto-Burman language, spoken by about 2000 people in Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. This volume provides a comprehensive grammatical description of the language, based on more than a year of original fieldwork in a Pangkhua village. Taking a broadly functional typological perspective, Zahid Akter analyzes Pangkhua phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Some of the typologically notable characteristics of Pangkhua include presence of a relatively large number of sesquisyllabic words, an elaborate person marking on verbs, absence of a clausal conjunctive, and lack of a distinct word class of adjectives. As the first comprehensive description of the language, this grammar contributes to comparative Tibeto-Burman linguistics more broadly by laying the groundwork for further studies locating Pangkhua in its genealogical, areal, and typological contexts. It will also serve as an invaluable resource for the maintenance and revitalization of Pangkhua language and culture.