A Grammar of Tukang Besi


Book Description

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.




Prominence in Austronesian


Book Description

The cognitive concept of prominence is increasingly seen as key to understanding the organisation of grammar. This volume explores the encoding of prominence in languages from across the Austronesian family. The contributions show how prominence is relevant to understanding asymmetries at different levels of grammatical structure, from discourse and information structure to argument expression and socio-pragmatics. Moreover, common themes across contributions point to crosslinguistic tendencies that underpin the conventionalisation of communicative patterns for coordinating interlocutors' attention, and to points of departure for further crosslinguistic exploration of how grammatical asymmetries can be explained in terms of prominence.




Parts of Speech


Book Description

Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets. These articles were originally published in "Studies in Language" 32:3 (2008).




Logic, Language, and Computation


Book Description

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2005, held in Batumi, Georgia. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous presentations at the symposium. The papers present current research in all aspects of linguistics, logic and computation.




Differential Subject Marking


Book Description

Not all sentences encode their subjects in the same way. Some languages overtly mark some subjects depending on certain features of the subject argument or the sentence in which the subject figures. This is known as Differential Subject Marking (DSM). Containing illuminating discussions of DSM from languages all over the world, this book shows that DSM is often the result of interactions between conflicting constraints on language use.




Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity


Book Description

In John McWhorter’s Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, but in the grammatical sense. His publications since the 1990s have argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles (i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also argued that in light of their pidgin birth, such languages are less grammatically complex than others, as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume, Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity, McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then, in the wake of responses from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable divergence in direction from his earlier work.




What Language Is


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author and renowned linguist, John McWhorter, explores the complicated and fascinating world of languages. From Standard English to Black English; obscure tongues only spoken by a few thousand people in the world to the big ones like Mandarin - What Language Is celebrates the history and curiosities of languages around the world and smashes our assumptions about "correct" grammar. An eye-opening tour for all language lovers, What Language Is offers a fascinating new perspective on the way humans communicate. From vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese, with copious revelations about the hodgepodge nature of English, John McWhorter shows readers how to see and hear languages as a linguist does. Packed with Big Ideas about language alongside wonderful trivia, What Language Is explains how languages across the globe (the Queen's English and Surinam creoles alike) originate, evolve, multiply, and divide. Raising provocative questions about what qualifies as a language (so-called slang does have structured grammar), McWhorter also takes readers on a marvelous journey through time and place-from Persian to the languages of Sri Lanka- to deliver a feast of facts about the wonders of human linguistic expression.




The Typology of Semantic Alignment


Book Description

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore thedifferences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific, the areas wheresemantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.




Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar


Book Description

In this book, Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist programme. The book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation.




A Grammar of Hup


Book Description

This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.