Animate, Inanimate Aims


Book Description

Poetry. Art. "Drawing the ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIM together, they settle into difference. With subtle contagion of body as structured text, titled ligatures in the midst, thick with emotional materiel, Brenda Iijima's work rhymes--off or near--sight as sound. Nature for culture, culture as nature, 'we/ can play school under a tree' or at war. Breaking and building in twitchy compression, the way Marie Menken's hand-held camera swings, framed and fabulous, this exuberant tragic book of drawings and poems will hook you"--Norma Cole. "A kind of necessity is created here for saying, rejuvenating myths, turning anger into jouissance, making thoughts a river of light...Beware: we won't be chagrined anymore; such subversion is the changing of the world"--Etel Adnan




Applicatives


Book Description

"Applicatives" is concerned with the syntax of constructions that contain arguments that transcend the traditional subject-object characterization, and how the syntax of such constructions yields the interpretive effects that previous research has identified. At the empirical level this volume remedies the inadequacies and limitations of previous accounts by proposing a more nuanced view of all the factors that enter into the syntax and semantics of applicatives. At the theoretical level, this book offers empirical arguments for various theoretical options currently entertained in the minimalist program, among which movement into theta-position, multiple agree, anti-locality, and a very derivational view on successive cyclic movement.




Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles


Book Description

The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case, animacy and semantic roles, thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies, these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena, such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition, theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example, what is case, how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages, Indo-European languages, Basque, Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case, animacy and/or semantic roles.







Postclassical Greek


Book Description

The language of Postclassical Greek is a somewhat neglected area of research despite the language of this period being well attested with a large number of different sorts of texts ranging from papyri and dialect inscriptions to literary texts by Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine writers. These texts offer an extensive amount of data and are rather understudied in comparison with texts of the Classical period. This volume aims to fill some of this void by offering an interdisciplinary approach to the language of the period. As such, it brings together contributions from disciplines including usage-based linguistics, theoretical syntax, historical linguistics, papyrology and palaeography, sociolinguistics and research on multilingualism. It is hoped, therefore, that the volume will appeal to a wide audience interested in exploring language development from several perspectives.




Korean Syntax and Semantics


Book Description

Explores the Korean language from both a syntactic and semantic perspective, combining mainstream ideas from minimalist syntax and formal semantics.




The Lexicon–Syntax Interface


Book Description

The present collection offers fresh perspectives on the lexicon-syntax interface, drawing on novel data from South Asian languages like Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Punjabi, and Telugu. It covers different phenomena like adjectives, nominal phrases, ditransitives, light verbs, middles, passives, causatives, agreement, and pronominal clitics, while trying to settle the theoretical tensions underlying the interaction of the lexicon with the narrow syntactic component. All the chapters critically survey previous analyses in detail, suggesting how these may or may not be extended to South Asian languages. Novel explanations are proposed, which handle not only the novel data presented here, but also pave alternative ways to look at issues of minimalist architecture.




Case-Marking in Contact


Book Description

Until recently, mixed languages were considered an oddity of contact linguistics, with debates about whether or not they actually existed stifling much descriptive work or discussion of their origins. These debates have shifted from questioning their existence to a focus on their formation, and their social and structural features. This book aims to advance our understanding of how mixed languages evolve by introducing a substantial corpus from a newly-described mixed language, Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people who live at Kalkaringi in northern Australia and is the result of pervasive code-switching practices. Although Gurindji Kriol bears some resemblance to both of its source languages, it uses the forms from these languages to function within a unique system. This book focuses on one structural aspect of Gurindji Kriol, case morphology, which is from Gurindji, but functions in ways that differ from its source.




Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar


Book Description

This descriptive reference grammar of Nishnaabemwin (Odawa and Eastern Ojibwe) includes extensive descriptive treatment of phonology, orthography, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and major structural and functional syntactic categories.




Papers of the Forty-Second Algonquian Conference


Book Description

Papers of the forty-second Algonquian Conference held at Memorial University of Newfoundland in October 2010. The papers of the Algonquian Conference have long served as the primary source of peer-reviewed scholarship addressing topics related to the languages and societies of Algonquian peoples. Contributions, which are peer-reviewed submissions presented at the annual conference, represent an assortment of humanities and social science disciplines, including archeology, cultural anthropology, history, ethnohistory, linguistics, literary studies, Native studies, social work, film, and countless others. Both theoretical and descriptive approaches are welcomed, and submissions often provide previously unpublished data from historical and contemporary sources, or novel theoretical insights based on firsthand research. The research is commonly interdisciplinary in scope and the papers are filled with contributions presenting fresh research from a broad array of researchers and writers. These papers are essential reading for those interested in Algonquian world views, cultures, history, and languages. They build bridges among a large international group of people who write in different disciplines. Scholars in linguistics, anthropology, history, education, and other fields are brought together in one vital community, thanks to these publications.