Sonora Yaqui Language Structures

Sonora Yaqui Language Structures PDF

Author: John M. Dedrick

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0816539278

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John Dedrick, who lived and worked among the Yaquis for more than thirty years, shares his extensive knowledge of the language, while Uto-Aztecan specialist Eugene Casad helps put the material in a comparative perspective."--Jacket

Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas PDF

Author: José Camacho

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 3110228521

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The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The readerfinds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas PDF

Author: Bernard Comrie

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-09-20

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 9027273391

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Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.

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.

Loanwords in the World's Languages

Loanwords in the World's Languages PDF

Author: Martin Haspelmath

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2009-12-22

Total Pages: 1104

ISBN-13: 3110218445

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This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the project's methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.

The World Atlas of Language Structures

The World Atlas of Language Structures PDF

Author: Martin Haspelmath

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-07-21

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 0199255911

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"The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) provides ... 142 maps showing the geographic distribution of structural linguistic features"--Intro.

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages PDF

Author: Katarzyna Janic

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2023-07-11

Total Pages: 888

ISBN-13: 3961104115

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This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual 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).

Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective PDF

Author: Yaron Matras

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-08-27

Total Pages: 609

ISBN-13: 311019919X

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The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).