A Grammar of Qaqet
A Grammar of Qaqet

Author: Birgit Hellwig

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 3110765799

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This grammar is a first detailed description of Qaqet, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the mountainous interior of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Qaqet belongs to the small Baining language family (comprising six languages), but its wider genetic affiliations remain unclear. It is included among the geographically-defined East Papuan languages. The grammar presents a synchronic description of the language. From a language family perspective, the Baining languages are structurally fairly similar, but there are considerable differences in detail that point to different language-internal developments and grammaticalization paths. From an East Papuan and areal perspective, Qaqet exhibits both typical East Papuan features (e.g., nominal classification, possessor/possessed order, highly compositional lexicon) as well as areal features (e.g., AVO ~ SV constituent order, articles and determiners, prepositions). The description is based on primary data collected during fieldwork (from 2011 onwards), including both natural and elicited data. The description thereby provides new analyses and insights that are relevant to our understanding of the genetic and areal relationships in this region.

Child-directed Speech in Qaqet
Child-directed Speech in Qaqet

Author: Henrike Frye

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1760465178

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Qaqet is a non-Austronesian language, spoken by about 15,000 people in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In the remote inland, children acquire Qaqet as their first language. Much of what we know about child‑directed speech (CDS) stems from children living in middle‑class, urban, industrialised contexts. This book combines evidence from different methods, showing that the features typical for speech to children in such contexts are also found in Qaqet CDS. Preliminary insights from naturalistic audio recordings suggest that Qaqet children are infrequently addressed directly. In interviews, Qaqet caregivers express the view that children ‘pick up’ the language on their own. Still, they have clear ideas about how to talk to children in a way that makes it easier for them to understand what is said. In order to compare adult- and child-directed speech in Qaqet, 20 retellings of a film have been analysed, half of them told to adults and half to children. The data show that talk directed to children differs from talk directed to adults for several features, among them utterance type, mean length of utterance, amount of hesitations and intonation. Despite this clear tendency, there seems to be a cut-off point of around 40 months of age for several of those features from which the talk directed to children becomes more like the talk directed to adults.

A grammar of Kalamang
A grammar of Kalamang

Author: Eline Visser

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published:

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 3961103437

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people in the villages Mas and Antalisa on the biggest of the Karas Islands, which lie just off the coast of Bomberai Peninsula. This work is the first comprehensive grammar of a Papuan language in the Bomberai area. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. This grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other West Bomberai or eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment. This grammar is accompanied by an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material and a dictionary with 2700 lemmas. It serves as a document of one of the world's many endangered languages.

A Grammar of Qaqet
A Grammar of Qaqet

Author: Birgit Hellwig

Publisher: ISSN

Published: 2020-12-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783110735314

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This grammar is a description of Qaqet, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the interior of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. It belongs to the small Baining language family, and it is included among the geographically-defined East Papu

Caused Accompanied Motion
Caused Accompanied Motion

Author: Anna Margetts

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 9027257868

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. The chapters investigate such events on the basis of spoken language corpora of endangered, underdescribed languages and in this way the volume showcases the importance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. The semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion shows considerable crosslinguistic variation in how meaning components are conflated within single lexemes or distributed across morphemes or clauses. The volume presents a typology of common patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of these events. The study of crosslinguistic event encoding provided in this volume contributes to our understanding of the nature, extent and limits of linguistic and cognitive diversity.

Special Onymic Grammar in Typological Perspective
Special Onymic Grammar in Typological Perspective

Author: Thomas Stolz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-12-04

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 3111331873

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For the first time, proper names are made the topic of a cross-linguistic account of morphosyntactic properties which formally distinguish place names, personal names, and common nouns. It is shown that the behaviour of place names and personal names in morphology and syntax frequently disagrees with the rules established for other word classes independent of the language’s genetic affiliation, grammatical structure, and geographic location. Place names and personal names each boast a grammar of their own. They are candidates for the status of a distinct word class. Their special grammar comes frequently to the fore in the domain of spatial and possessive relations. This fact is explained with reference to functional notions.

Proper Names versus Common Nouns
Proper Names versus Common Nouns

Author: Javier Caro Reina

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-11-07

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 311067274X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Recent research has shown that proper names morphosyntactically differ from common nouns in many ways. However, little is known about the morphological and syntactic/distributional differences between proper names and common nouns in less known (Non)-Indo-European languages. This volume brings together contributions which explore morphosyntactic phenomena such as case marking, gender assignment rules, definiteness marking, and possessive constructions from a synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspective. The languages surveyed include Austronesian languages, Basque, English, German, Hebrew, and Romance languages. The volume contributes to a better understanding not only of the contrasts between proper names and common nouns, but also of formal contrasts between different proper name classes such as personal names, place names, and others.

Predication in African Languages
Predication in African Languages

Author: James Essegbey

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9027247013

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book discusses patterns of predication and their grammatical and semantic implications in a variety of African languages. It covers several prominent topics about predication in the languages, including locative predication, expressions of tense, aspect, and mood in relation to verbal complexes and verb serialisation, verb semantics, and nominalization of predicates. The chapters take inspiration from Felix Ameka’s approach to the study of language according to which the main task of a linguist is to collaborate with language users to understand communicative practices in different contexts and to uncover how these practices impact grammatical and semantic aspects of the language. Accordingly, the descriptions and analyses in this book serve to understand language variation in different ecologies, rather than to impose pre-established descriptive frames on less described languages. Together, the chapters in the book represent a bird’s eye view of predication strategies in various African languages and can therefore serve as readings for both introductory and advanced level courses on predication from a typological or comparative perspective.

Mali (Baining) Grammar
Mali (Baining) Grammar

Author: Tonya N. Stebbins

Publisher: Pacific Linguistics College of Asia and Pacific the Australian National University

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mali (2,200 speakers) is a Papuan language spoken on the Gazelle Peninsula, East New Britain Province Papua New Guinea. It is a member of the Baining language family. The family is comprised of five languages: Kaket, Mali, Simbali, Ura and Kairak. Baining people share a common non-Austronesian ancestral language and similar cultural practices (such as fire dances). An interesting feature of these languages is that they show a great deal of influence from their early Austronesian neighbors. As detailed in the grammar, Mali has characteristics of both the Western Oceanic branch of Austronesian and Trans New Guinea. This is the first comprehensive grammar for a language from the family and provides a framework for further comparative and descriptive research in the region. The grammar was produced in cooperation with members of the Mali (Baining) community and is being published alongside a dictionary and text collection (also available from Pacific Linguistics).