The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking
The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking

Author: Michael Cysouw

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-01-29

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0191564990

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This book explores person markers, the linguistic elements that provide points of reference to speech-act participants. Michael Cysouw develops a new framework for the typology of person marking based on the rejection of the notion of plurality for its analysis. When a mother says "Mummy is going to say goodnight now", Mummy is the person marker in a way that in English is confined to motherese but which is used more commonly in some other languages and may also be characteristic of much earlier forms. Dr Cysouw divides the person markers of 400 languages into paradigms. He considers how the structure of these person paradigms relates to their function. His investigation provides a clear account of how person markers work syntactically, pragmatically, and semantically as well as giving fresh insights into aspects of linguistic change, language-relatedness, and the interfaces between discourse, syntax, and semantics. The combination of a typological and a comparative approach results in the first outline of a cognitive map of the paradigmatic structure of person marking.

A Grammar of Mongsen Ao
A Grammar of Mongsen Ao

Author: A.R. Coupe

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-08-27

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 3110198525

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A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author’s fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The languages of this region remain under-documented for a number of historical reasons. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the widespread cultural practice of head-hunting discouraged outsiders from entering the Naga Hills. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, an armed rebellion by Naga separatists and a government policy of restricting access to the troubled area ensured that Nagaland remained a difficult place to conduct research. In this context, A Grammar of Mongsen Ao offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory. This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.

THE BOUNDS
THE BOUNDS

Author: Kamala Narasimha

Publisher: PartridgeIndia

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1482823357

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There are communities in the India of today that find themselves in the cleft stick of having to speak without having a language to speak in. For example, LGBT's, farming communities, the labour classes, the artisan classes, classes of people generally that inhabit the backwaters of society. About 50% of the country's women hasn't found such a language or medium to express itself. Man has been double-crossing woman, denying her the voice to speak up. In this third novel of the author, there is an attempt to discover unshackled new paths. This novel negotiates with it at two levels. To begin with, her physical body is woman's language. She speaks through its enormous 'performing, creating, authoring ability', its vitality and sympathy with the world. The novel engages in an in-depth exploration of woman's independent or autonomous situatedness in life. Woman is not weak. But she is made weak. Without a husband and with no material object or framework as an anchor, Savitri goes about building life not for herself or for her children, but for firming up the bond between her human environment and nature: she does it through decentralizing power centres that . are arrayed in front of her.

Increased Empiricism
Increased Empiricism

Author: Zhuo Jing-Schmidt

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 9027271410

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Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics showcases recent trends in the co-development of theory and empiricism in Chinese linguistics. The volume tackles a wide range of theoretical and empirical problems in multiple subfields including sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, lexical semantics, pragmatics, phonetics and phonology, corpus linguistics, and Chinese second language acquisition. The contributions do not fall neatly into two sections traditionally labeled “theoretical” and “empirical”. Rather, theoretical discussions are buttressed by empirical evidence, and empirical analyses lead to theoretical generalizations. Furthermore, the volume transcends the functional-formal division, showing that empiricism not only empowers functional-typological and sociolinguistic research, but can also have a place in formally oriented linguistic analysis.

Functional Structure from Top to Toe
Functional Structure from Top to Toe

Author: Peter Svenonius

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0199740399

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This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor. Dedicated to Tarald Taraldsen, the collection reflects the diverse energies that have pushed the cartographic program forward over the last decade. The first three papers deal with subject extraction, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. Luigi Rizzi presents arguments that subjects are 'criterial' and that subject extraction is highly restricted. Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche concur, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Adriana Belletti shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. The fourth paper, by Ian Roberts, analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The papers by M. Rita Manzini and Richard S. Kayne both present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The final three papers address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, Guglielmo Cinque's in a typological context and Anders Holmberg's within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final paper, by Edwin Williams, presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.