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Author: Gunter Senft
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000-08-03
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 9780521770750
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA major linguistic study of nominal classification systems across a variety of languages, first published in 2000.
Author: Marcin Kilarski
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2013-12-18
Total Pages: 421
ISBN-13: 9027270902
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages, the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon, grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result, the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure, the diverse functions of grammatical categories, linguistic complexity, agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier, supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.
Author: Marc Allassonnière-Tang
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2023-12-01
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 9027249245
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLinguists have long been interested in systems of nominal classification due to their diverse functions as well as cognitive and cultural correlates. Among others, ongoing research has focused on semantic, functional and morphosyntactic properties of complex systems such as co-occurring gender and numeral classifiers. Such approaches have typically focused on the languages of north-western South America and Papua New Guinea. This volume proposes to fill in a gap in existing research by focusing on Asia, based on case studies from languages belonging to a wide range of families, i.e., Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Mongolic, Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai as well as the language isolate Nivkh. Gender and classifiers in these languages are approached within several different perspectives, i.e., functional, typological and diachronic, thus revealing complex patterns in their lexical and pragmatic functions as well as origin, development and loss. Describing and analysing such properties is a unique and innovative contribution of the volume.
Author: William B. McGregor
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2018-05-14
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9027264139
DOWNLOAD EBOOKClassification is a popular topic in typological, descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This volume is the first to deal specifically with the diachrony of linguistic systems of classification. It comprises original papers that examine the ways in which linguistic classification systems arise, change, and dissipate in both natural circumstances and in circumstances of attrition. The role of diffusion in such processes is explored, as well as the question of what can be diffused. The volume is not restricted to nominal systems of classification, but also includes papers dealing with the less well-known phenomenon of verbal classification. Languages from a wide spread of world regions are examined, including Africa, Amazonia, Australia, Eurasia, Oceania, and Mesoamerica. The volume will be of interest to linguistic typologists, descriptive linguists, historical linguists, and grammaticalization theorists.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published:
Total Pages: 39
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Pamela Downing
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 1996-01-01
Total Pages: 357
ISBN-13: 9027226148
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNumeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system, its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts. Interestingly, although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure, this study reports that in actual usage, the semantic role of classifiers is slight only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear, however, that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons, the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar, and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.
Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2000-03-30
Total Pages: 562
ISBN-13: 0191543985
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlmost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published:
Total Pages: 17
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Matthias Benjamin Passer
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 666
ISBN-13: 9789460932168
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere are two ways for a language to classify its nouns: either by means of classifiers, which specify the semantics of the classified noun, or by means of grammatical gender, which groups all nouns of a language into formal classes. This thesis investigates the common assumption that classifier systems may develop into grammatical gender systems. Because this diachronic phenomenon has not yet been documented for any language, the likeliness that such a development would occur is examined by means of a typological study of synchronic systems. In analyzing the data, this study adopts a new perspective on the development of nominal classification by separating how the means of formal expression develops from the development of those components that have to do with a system's semantic transparency. This twofold account for the data from a variety sample of 40 languages shows that there is indeed a number of systems that lie at the intersection of classifiers and gender systems, but that a direct shift from classifier to gender is not likely to occur.
Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2003-01-01
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9789027229632
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book proposes a framework for describing languages through the description of relationships among lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology. The framework is based on the notion of formal coding means; the principle of functional transparency; the notion of functional domains; and the notion of systems interaction in the coding of functional domains. The study is based on original analyses of cross-linguistic data.The fundamental finding of the study is that different languages may code different functional domains, which must be discovered by analyzing the formal means available in each language. The first part of the book proposes a methodology for discovering functional domains and the second part describes the properties of various functional domains. The book presents new cross-linguistic analyses of theoretical issues including agreement; phenomena attributed to government; nominal classification; prerequisites for and implications of linear order coding; and defining characteristics of lexical categories. The study also contributes new analyses of specific problems in individual languages.
