A Grammar of Tundra Nenets


Book Description

The book is the first substantial description of Tundra Nenets, a highly endangered Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia and the north of European Russia, destined for the international linguistic community. Its purpose is to provide a thorough documentation of all of the major grammatical phenomena in the language. The grammar particularly emphasizes the description of syntax, because this has traditionally been a very neglected area of Nenets studies. Many syntactic aspects have not received a systematic treatment in the existing literature or have not been addressed at all. Since the existing works are not easily available, incomplete, or idiosyncratically presented, Tundra Nenets syntax has played little or no role in the considerations of modern linguists, whether more descriptively or theoretically inclined. The book is largely descriptive: it is not intended to address theoretical questions per se and the description is not meant to be formulated within a particular framework. However, it identifies and discusses issues which are of broad typological and theoretical interest. The description is richly exemplified. Most of the cited examples are the result of fieldwork conducted by the in various locations. They are sentences produced by native speakers either spontaneously or elicited in response to questions posed in Russian. Other examples are excerpts from original texts.




Transeurasian Verbal Morphology in a Comparative Perspective


Book Description

The term Transeurasian refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages stretching from the Pacific in the East to the Mediterranean in the West. They share a significant amount of linguistic properties and include five linguistic families: Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. There is disagreement among scholars on the question whether these languages are genealogically related in the sense of an "Altaic" family. Many linguists, however, seem to agree on at least one point, namely that investigations into the striking correspondences in the domain of verbal morphology could substantially help unravelling the question. The present volume brings together prominent specialists in the field who explore potentially shared features of verbal morphology among the Transeurasian languages and search for the best way to explain them. Important issues dealt with include the following: How useful is verbal morphology really in establishing genealogical relations among languages? Is there concrete evidence for cognate verbal morphology across the Transeurasian languages? Is it possible to draw wider connections with Indo-European and Uralic? How to distinguish between genealogical retention and copying of verbal morphology? In which ways can typological similarities be significant in this context?




Word-Formation


Book Description

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.




The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia


Book Description

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.




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 the differences 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 where semantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.




Analogy in Grammar


Book Description

In this book, leading researchers in morphology, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics address central questions about the form and acquisition of analogy in grammar. What kinds of patterns do speakers select as the basis for analogical extension? What types of items are particularly susceptible or resistant to analogical pressures? At what levels do analogical processes operate and how do processes interact? What formal mechanisms areappropriate for modelling analogy? The novel synthesis of typological, theoretical, computational, and developmental paradigms in this volume brings us closer to answering these questions than ever before.




Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity


Book Description

There is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex segmental sequences from phonetic, phonological and psycholinguistic perspectives. This volume draws from selected contributions to the conference Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity held in Munich in August 2008. Consonant sequences, whether occurring within individual lexical items or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. But contributions also consider the integration of tonal and vocalic elements into syllable structure. The main aim of the volume is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. The book is organized into four main sections entitled ‘Phonology and Typology’, ‘Production: Analysis and Models’, ‘Acquisition’, and ‘Assimilation and reduction in connected speech’.







The Uralic Languages


Book Description

This book provides a unique, up-to-date survey of individual Uralic languages and sub-groupings from Finnish to Selkup. Spoken by more than 25 million native speakers, the Uralic languages have important cultural and social significance in Northern and Eastern Europe, as well as in immigrant communitites throughout Europe and North America. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the Uralic language family and is followed by 18 chapter-length descriptions of each language or sub-grouping, giving an analysis of their history and development as well as focusing on their linguistic structures. Written by internationally recognised experts and based on the most recent scholarship available, the volume covers major languages - including the official national languages of Estonia, Finland and Hungary - and rarely-covered languages such as Mordva, Nganasan and Khanty. The 18 language chapters are similarly-structured, designed for comparative study and cover phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Those on individual languages also have sample text where available. Each chapter includes numerous tables to support and illustrate the text and bibliographies of the major references for each language to aid further study. The volume is comprehensively indexed. This book will be invaluable to language students, experts requiring concise but thorough information on related languages and anyone working in historical, typological and comparative linguistics.