A Grammar of Mapuche

A Grammar of Mapuche PDF

Author: Ineke Smeets

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-12-10

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 3110211793

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Mapuche is the language of the Mapuche (or Araucanians), the native inhabitants of central Chile. The Mapuche language, also called Mapudungu, is spoken by about 400,000 people in Chile and 40,000 in Argentina. The Mapuche people, estimated at about one million, constitute the majority of the Chilean indigenous population. The history of the Mapuche is the story of passionate fighters who managed to stop the Inca's but succumbed to the Spanish invaders after two and a half century of warfare. The relationship of the Mapuche language with other Amerindian languages has not yet been established. Mapuche is a highly agglutinative language with a complex verbal morphology. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed description of the Mapuche language. It contains a grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax), a collection of texts (stories, conversations and songs) with morphological analyses and free translations, and a Mapuche-English dictionary with a large number of derivations and examples. The grammar is preceded by a socio-historical sketch of the Mapuche people and a brief discussion of previous studies of the Mapuche language. The material for the description was collected by the author with the help of five Mapuche speakers with attention to the dialectal differences between them. The abundance of thoroughly analysed examples makes for a lively decription of the language. The intricacy of the verbal morphology will arouse the interest not only of those who practice Amerindian linguistics but also of those who are interested in language theory and language typology.

Language of the Land

Language of the Land PDF

Author: Leslie Ray

Publisher: IWGIA

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9788791563379

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This is the first book in English to examine the contemporary Mapuche: their culture, their struggle for autonomy within the modern-day nation state, their religion, language, and distinct identity. Leslie Ray looks back over the history of relations between the Mapuche and the Argentine and Chilean states, and examines issues of ethnicity, biodiversity, and bio-piracy in Mapuche lands today, their struggle for rights over natural resources, and the impact of tourism and neoliberalism. The Mapuche of what is today southern Chile and Argentina were the first and only indigenous peoples on the continent to have their sovereignty legally recognized by the Spanish empire, and their reputation for ferocity and bravery was legendary among the Spanish invaders. Their sense of communal identity and personal courage has forged among the Mapuche a strong instinct for self-preservation over the centuries. Today their struggle continues: neither Chile nor Argentina specifically recognize the rights of indigenous peoples. In recent years disputes over land rights, particularly in Chile, have provoked fierce protests from the Mapuche. In both countries, policies of assimilation have had a disastrous effect on the Mapuche language and cultural integrity. Even so, in recent years the Mapuche have managed a remarkable cultural and political resurgence, in part through a tenacious defense of their ancestral lands and natural resources against marauding multinationals, which has catapulted them to regional and international attention. Leslie Ray has been a freelance translator since the mid 1980s. He has translated a number of books from Italian and Spanish in the fields of architecture, design, and art history. A regular visitor to Argentina since the late eighties, he has worked actively with Mapuche organizations there since the late 1990s. In addition to his work on the Mapuche, he has also published articles on Argentine social, indigenous, and language-related issues for publications as diverse as History Today and The Linguist.

The Language of the Land

The Language of the Land PDF

Author: Leslie Ray

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781899365579

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The Mapuche of what is today southern Chile and Argentina were the first and only indigenous peoples on the continent to have their sovereignty legally recognised by the Spanish empire, and their reputation for ferocity and bravery was legendary among the Spanish invaders. Their sense of communal identity and personal courage has forged among the Mapuche a strong instinct for self-preservation. Today their struggle continues: neither Chile nor Argentina specifically recognise the rights of indigenous peoples. In recent years disputes over land rights, particularly in Chile, have provoked fierce protests from the Mapuche. In both countries, policies of assimilation have had a disastrous effect on the Mapuche language and cultural integrity. Even so, in the last ten years the Mapuche have managed a remarkable cultural and political resurgence, in part through a tenacious defence of their ancestral lands and natural resources against marauding multinationals which has catapulted them to regional and international attention. The Language of the Land is the first book in English to examine the contemporary Mapuche: their culture, their struggle for autonomy within the modern-day nation state, their religion, language and distinct identity. Leslie Ray examines issues of ethnicity, biodiversity and biopiracy in Mapuche lands, their struggle for rights over natural resources, and the impacts of tourism and neoliberalism.

The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions

The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions PDF

Author: Roberto Zariquiey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-05-19

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0192593722

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This volume explores the grammatical properties of body-part expressions across a range of languages and language families in the Americas, including Arawakan, Eastern Tukano, Mataguayan, Panoan, and Takanan. Expressions denoting parts of the body often exhibit specific grammatical properties that are intrinsically related to their semantics, and frequently appear in dedicated constructions, many of which are found exclusively in association with these expressions. Following a detailed introduction and discussion of the foundations of body-part grammar, the chapters in the first part of the book investigate categorialization, lexicalization, and the semantic processes associated with body-part expressions. In the second part of the book, contributors investigate specific grammatical properties of body-part expressions, such as inalienability, incorporation, possessive constructions, prefixation, topicality, and word-formation strategies. The volume draws on data from lesser-known languages that are often under-represented in comparative work, and makes a significant contribution not only to the linguistics of the Americas and the typology of body-part expressions, but also to typological studies more broadly, and to historical, comparative, and anthropological linguistics.

The Art of Grammar

The Art of Grammar PDF

Author: Aleksandr Aĭkhenvalʹd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0199683220

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This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. It describes the means of collecting, analysing, and organizing data, and discusses the typological parameters that can be used to explore relationships with other languages.

Applicative Constructions in the World’s Languages

Applicative Constructions in the World’s Languages PDF

Author: Fernando Zuniga

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-01-29

Total Pages: 1100

ISBN-13: 3110730952

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This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).

Argument Selectors

Argument Selectors PDF

Author: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9027263027

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Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations, the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties, argument selector, as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates, referential properties of arguments, as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.

Studies in Ditransitive Constructions

Studies in Ditransitive Constructions PDF

Author: Andreĭ Lʹvovich Malʹchukov

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 3110220369

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Explores the cross-linguistic variation in ditransitive constructions, syntactic patterns of 'give'-like verbs taking Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. This volume includes a typological overview of ditransitive constructions, the editors' questionnaire, as well as studies of ditransitive constructions in languages from all over the world.

Benefactives and Malefactives

Benefactives and Malefactives PDF

Author: Fernando Zúñiga

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-04-14

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9027288313

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Benefactives are constructions used to express that a state of affairs holds to someone’s advantage. The same construction sometimes also serves as a malefactive, whose meanings are generally not a simple mirror image of the benefactive. Benefactive constructions cover a wide range of phenomena: malefactive passives, general and specialized benefactive cases and adpositions, serial verb constructions and converbal constructions (including e.g. verbs of giving and taking), benefactive applicatives, and other morphosyntactic strategies. The present book is the first collection of its kind to be published on this topic. It includes both typological surveys and in-depth descriptive studies, exploring both the morphosyntactic properties and the semantic nuances of phenomena ranging from the familiar English double-object construction and the Japanese adversative passive to comparable phenomena found in lesser-known languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The book will appeal to typologists and linguists interested in linguistic diversity and it will also be a useful reference work for linguists working on language description.