A systematic presentation of the overall grammatical structure of Woleaian, spoken in the Caroline Islands. For those who want to learn the language and for linguists who are interested for theoretical purposes.
This book is based on the results of research in language typology, and motivated by the need for a theory to explain them. The essence of the approach is (a) that almost all aspects of grammatical structure are language specific, and (b) that language universals are to be found in conceptual structure and in the mapping of conceptual structure on to linguistic form. It proposes intimate links between syntactic and semantic structures, and argues that the basic elements of any language are not syntactic but syntactic-semantic 'Gestalts'. Professor Croft puts forward a new approach to syntactic representation and a new model of how language and languages work. He covers a wide range of syntactic phenomena, illustrating these with examples that show the varied grammatical structures of the world's languages. The book will be accessible all linguists at graduate level and beyond.
This exploration of the versatility of writing systems highlights their complexity when they are used to represent loanwords, solve problems of polysemy or when they are adapted to be used for another language. The approaches from different academic traditions provide a varied but expert account.
Volumes in the Trends in Linguistics. Documentation series focus on the presentation of linguistic data. The series addresses the sustained interest in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, grammars and editions of under-described and hitherto undocumented languages. All world-regions and time periods are represented.
Every language has been influenced in some way by other languages. In many cases, this influence is reflected in words which have been absorbed from other languages as the names for newer items or ideas, such as perestroika, manga, or intifada (from Russian, Japanese, and Arabic respectively). In other cases, the influence of other languages goes deeper, and includes the addition of new sounds, grammatical forms, and idioms to the pre-existing language. For example, English's structure has been shaped in such a way by the effects of Norse, French, Latin, and Celtic--though English is not alone in its openness to these influences. Any features can potentially be transferred from one language to another if the sociolinguistic and structural circumstances allow for it. Further, new languages--pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages--can come into being as the result of language contact. In thirty-three chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact examines the various forms of contact-induced linguistic change and the levels of language which have provided instances of these influences. In addition, it provides accounts of how language contact has affected some twenty languages, spoken and signed, from all parts of the world. Chapters are written by experts and native-speakers from years of research and fieldwork. Ultimately, this Handbook provides an authoritative account of the possibilities and products of contact-induced linguistic change.
This book presents a collection of papers on clusivity, a newly coined term for the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Clusivity is a widespread feature familiar from descriptive grammars and frequently figuring in typological schemes and diachronic scenarios. However, no comprehensive exploration of it has been available so far. This book is intended to make the first step towards a better understanding of the inclusive–exclusive opposition, by documenting the current linguistic knowledge on the topic. The issues discussed include the categorial and paradigmatic status of the opposition, its geographical distribution, realization in free vs bound pronouns, inclusive imperatives, clusivity in the 2nd person, honorific uses of the distinction, etc. These case studies are complemented by the analysis of the opposition in American Sign Language as opposed to spoken languages. In-depth areal and family surveys of clusivity consider this opposition in Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, central-western South American, Turkic languages, and in Mosetenan and Shuswap.
This title investigates the relationship between morphology and syntax. It examines the formation of morphologically complex words - that is, the mechanisms of grammar that may cause two or more of the simplest elements of language, or morphemes, to be combined into a single word.