The Lillooet Language
The Lillooet Language

Author: Jan Van Eijk

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0774842024

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This book is the first complete descriptive grammar of Lillooet, an Indigenous Canadian language spoken in British Columbia, now threatened with extinction. The author discusses three major aspects of the language sound system, word structure, and syntax in great detail. The classical structuralism method of analysis, as developed in North America by Leonard Bloomfield and his followers, is used to look at every aspect of Lillooet in terms of its function and position within the whole structure of the language. Van Eijk explains terms and procedures in order to make the book accessible not only to the advanced linguist, but also to the undergraduate student with basic linguistic training. Written with great clarity and well organized, the book is illustrated with copious examples drawn from many years of fieldwork in St't'imc territory.

The Languages of Native North America
The Languages of Native North America

Author: Marianne Mithun

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-06-07

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 9780521298759

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This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Sessional Papers
Sessional Papers

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1888

Total Pages: 710

ISBN-13:

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"Report of the Dominion fishery commission on the fisheries of the province of Ontario, 1893", issued as vol. 26, no. 7, supplement.

A Complex Culture of the British Columbia Plateau
A Complex Culture of the British Columbia Plateau

Author: Brian Hayden

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 0774844612

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Early hunter/gatherer societies have traditionally been considered basically egalitarian in nature. This assumption, however, has been challenged by contemporary archaeological and anthropological research, which has demonstrated that many of these societies had complex social, economic, and political structures. This volume considers two British Columbia Native communities -- the Lillooet and Shuswap communities of Fountain and Pavilion - and traces their development into complex societies. The authors explore the relation between resource characteristics and hunter/gatherer adaptations and examine the use of fish, animal, and plant species, documenting their availability and the techniques used in their gathering, processing, and storing. The book also shows how cultural practices, such as raiding, potlatching, and stewardship of resources, can be explained from a cultural ecological point of view. An important contribution to the study of hunting and gathering cultures in the Northwest, this book is the most detailed examination of the subsistence base of a particular hunting and gathering group to date. Its exploration of the reasons why complex hunting and gathering societies emerge, as well as the ecological relationships between cultures and resources, will make an important contribution to the study of cultural ecology and contemporary archaeology.

Languages in Contact
Languages in Contact

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 9004488472

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The present volume includes papers that were presented at the conference Languages in Contact at the University of Groningen (25-26 November 1999). The conference was held to celebrate the University of St. Petersburg’s award of an honorary doctorate to Tjeerd de Graaf of Groningen. In general, the issues discussed in the articles involve pidgins and creoles, minorities and their languages, Diaspora situations, Sprachbund phenomena, extralinguistic correlates of variety in contact situations, problems of endangered languages and the typology of these languages. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between languages of the Russian Empire / USSR / Russian Federation, their survival and the influence of Russian.

The Linguistic Cycle : Language Change and the Language Faculty
The Linguistic Cycle : Language Change and the Language Faculty

Author: Department of English Arizona State University Elly van Gelderen Regents' Professor

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011-04-08

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0199857636

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Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.

Benefactives and Malefactives
Benefactives and Malefactives

Author: Fernando Zúñiga

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-04-14

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9027288313

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Benefactives are constructions used to express that a state of affairs holds to someone’s advantage. The same construction sometimes also serves as a malefactive, whose meanings are generally not a simple mirror image of the benefactive. Benefactive constructions cover a wide range of phenomena: malefactive passives, general and specialized benefactive cases and adpositions, serial verb constructions and converbal constructions (including e.g. verbs of giving and taking), benefactive applicatives, and other morphosyntactic strategies. The present book is the first collection of its kind to be published on this topic. It includes both typological surveys and in-depth descriptive studies, exploring both the morphosyntactic properties and the semantic nuances of phenomena ranging from the familiar English double-object construction and the Japanese adversative passive to comparable phenomena found in lesser-known languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The book will appeal to typologists and linguists interested in linguistic diversity and it will also be a useful reference work for linguists working on language description.

The World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures

Author: Martin Haspelmath

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-07-21

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 0191531243

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The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description of the structural feature in question. The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages. The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to be without it.