Browse

Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to achieve this for syntactic theory, using data from Archi (Nakh–Daghestanian, Lezgic), an endangered language with an extremely complex agreement system. We undertake a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories, through detailed examination of the theoretical principles underlying the mechanisms that model agreement. Our objective is to assess the tractability and predictive power of these leading models of syntax—Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and Minimalism—using a complete set of data on an agreement system from a language that has not hitherto been analysed in these frameworks.

Linguistics is the science of language, similar to how mathematics is the science of numbers. A reference grammar is a scientific enterprise. It brings together a coherent treatment of each language as a system where everything fits together, within the cultural, and historical, context of the language. This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. The aim of this book is to offer a guide for creating a reference grammar based on empirical facts and combining description, interpretation, and analysis, spanning phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, and semantics. The book consists of fifteen chapters and is accompanied by a Glossary of terms.

This book presents findings from a long-term study of a range of complex predicate types subsumed under the heading, Auxiliary Verb Constructions (AVCs), drawing on a database of over 800 languages. Chapter 1 discusses how the terms auxiliary verb and auxiliary verb construction are understood, and then provides an overview of the kinds of functional categories that AVCs serve to encode. A cursory typology is offered of the patterns of encoding inflectional/morphosyntactic/ functional semantic categories in AVCs, and notions of functional and formal headedness within AVCs are introduced. Five macro-patterns of inflection emerge, each with several sub-patterns. Chapters 2 to 5 are dedicated to the presentation of the varied sub-types of inflectional patterns seen in AVCs. These are called the AUX-headed, LEX-headed, doubled, and the split and split/doubled patterns. Each of these is extensively exemplified. In the final two chapters, various aspects of the diachronic origins of AVCs are discussed. Chapter 6 discusses where AVCs go once they have been grammaticalized, offering a range of complex verb forms that have derived from each of the inflectional macro-patterns of AVCs. Chapter 7 discusses diachronic origins of AVCs. This includes a discussion of both typical lexical source semantics for the grammaticalization paths of individual functional subtypes of AVC as well as the syntactic source construction types for each of the five macro-patterns and some of their more common sub-patterns. These source constructions draw into the discussion of how auxiliary verb constructions fit within the broadest possible typology of complex predicate phenomena. It offers an analysis of not only AVCs, but also such related complex predicate phenomena as serial verb constructions, verb complement structures, coordinate and clause chaining constructions, ‘light’ verbs, etc.

This book focuses on the form and the function of commands—directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders—from a typological perspective. A team of internationally renowned experts in the field examine the interrelationship of these speech acts with cultural stereotypes and practices, as well as their origins and development, especially in the light of language contact. The volume begins with an introduction outlining the marking and the meaning of imperatives and other ways of expressing commands and directives. Each of the chapters that follow then offers an in-depth analysis of commands in a particular language. These analyses are cast in terms of ‘basic linguistic theory’—a cumulative typological functional framework—and the chapters are arranged and structured in a way that allows useful comparison between them. The languages investigated include Quechua, Japanese, Lao, Aguaruna and Ashaninka Satipo (both from Peru), Dyirbal (from Australia), Zenzontepec Chatino (from Mexico), Nungon, Tayatuk, and Karawari (from Papua New Guinea), Korowai (from West Papua), Wolaitta (from Ethiopia), and Northern Paiute (a native language of the United States).

This volume traces the development of English phonology and morphology from Proto-Germanic to Old English of about the year 900 and describes Old English syntax in a modern framework from a historical perspective. An introduction describing the linguistic state of early Old English in general terms is followed by two chapters detailing the changes that can be shown to have occurred from Proto-Germanic to Proto-Northwest Germanic and from the latter to Proto-West Germanic. The fourth chapter is a grammatical sketch of Proto-West Germanic. There follows a chapter on developments that occurred in the northern part of the West Germanic speech area. Chapter 6 describes the phonological changes that occurred in the separate development of Old English, with special attention to the recoverable relative chronology of the changes; Chapter 7 does the same for morphological changes. Finally, Chapter 8 is a comprehensive description of Old English syntax in a modern theoretical framework, with notes on changes that occurred during the attested Old English period and on what little can be recovered of the syntactic prehistory of the language. The discussion throughout is technical; it is meant to be accessible especially to linguists who do not specialize in Old English nor in historical linguistics, but it will also be of use to students who already have some background in linguistics.

This book presents brand new research into the great structural diversity found in Sinitic languages. While many studies focus principally on Standard Mandarin, this work draws on extensive empirical data from lesser-known languages, and seeks to dispel many recurrent linguistic myths about the Sinitic language family. Part I presents findings that show the important interplay of research into diachronic linguistics and typology in China, beginning with a discussion of how to tackle the issue of linguistic diversity in Sinitic languages. Chapters in Part II examine the Sinitic languages from a crosslinguistic perspective with pan-Sinitic explorations of demonstrative paradigms; bare classifier phrases in relation to the coding of definiteness; and of the diachronic development of two main structures for comparatives of inequality with respect to issues in language contact. Part III is devoted to individual studies of linguistic micro-areas in China: Pinghua and the Guangxi Autonomous Region in the far South of China; Shaowu Min in the northwestern corner of Fujian province; the Wu dialect of Fuyang; and the Hui’an Southern Min dialect in the South of Fujian province.

This book studies the languages of Yidiñ, Warrgamay and Dyribal and the interrelations between them. The introductory chapter sets out the anthropological and linguistic background. In Part I there is a through examination of, and comparison between, the gender system in Dyirbal and the set of nominal classifiers in Yidiñ. The chapters in Part II describe Dyirbal’s unusual kinship system and the ‘mother-in-law’ language style, and examines the origins of ‘mother-in-law’ vocabulary in Dyirbal and in Yidiñ. There are four grammatical studies in Part III, dealing with syntactic orientation, serial verb constructions, complementation strategies, and grammatical reanalysis. Part IV covers grammatical and lexical variation across the dialects of Dyirbal, compensatory phonological changes, and a study of language contact across the Cairns rainforest region. The two final chapters in Part V, recount the sad stories of how the Yidiñ and Dyirbal languages slowly slipped into oblivion.

This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of ‘flexible words’, i.e. words that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. This is because flexible words can -without special morphosyntactic marking- serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, ‘specialised’ word classes. Thus, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like ‘predicating’ (verbal function), ‘referring’ (nominal function) or ‘modifying’ (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though languages with flexible word classes have been known to exist for more than a century, the phenomenon of lexical flexibility has not played a role in the development of linguistic typology or modern grammatical theory. The current volume aims to remedy this situation by offering ten detailed studies on lexical word classes, investigating their properties and what it means for the grammar of a language to have such a word class. Each contributor to this volume is an expert on lexical flexibility, either because the author has studied lexical flexibility in a particular language, or because (s)he has investigated flexible word classes across languages. Furthermore, this collection of articles provides a variety of theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of lexical flexibility. The book shows that the recognition and study of flexible words adds significantly to our understanding of the nature of human language and its place in human cognition.

This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging language underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories as tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order. The book considers how far these changes are interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of Romance. It describes the historical background to the emergence of the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in detail the richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family. The book reviews the accounts and explanations that have been proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent theoretical developments. This account shows that the transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation.

This book describes the earliest reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English, focusing specifically on linguistic structure. It outlines the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, considers the changes by which one dialect of that prehistoric language developed into Proto-Germanic, and provides a detailed account of the grammar of Proto-Germanic. In the course of his exposition Don Ringe draws on a long tradition of work on many languages, including Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, Gothic, and Old Norse. This second edition has been significantly revised to provide a more in-depth account of Proto-Indo-European, with further exploration of disputed points; it has also been updated to include new developments in the field, particularly in the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verb and nominal inflection. The author also reconsiders some of his original approaches to specific linguistic changes and their relative chronology based on his recent research.

Every language has some means of categorizing objects into humans, or animates, or by their shape, form, size, and function. The most wide-spread are linguistic genders—grammatical classes of nouns based on core semantic properties such as sex (female and male), animacy, humanness, and also shape and size. Classifiers of several types also serve to categorize entities. Numeral classifiers occur with number words, possessive classifiers appear in the expressions of possession, and verbal classifiers are used on a verb, categorizing its argument. Genders and classifiers of varied types can occur together. Their meanings reflect beliefs and traditions, and in many ways mirror the ways in which speakers view the ever-changing reality. This volume elaborates on the expression, usage, history, and meanings of noun categorization devices, exploring their various facets across the languages of South America and Asia, known for the diversity of their noun categorization. The volume starts with a typological introduction outlining the types of noun categorization devices, their expression, scope, and functions, in addition to the socio-cultural aspects of their use, and their development. It is followed by revised versions of eight papers focussing on gender and classifier systems in two areas of high diversity—South America (with a focus on Amazonia) and Asia.

This book offers both a linguistic and anthropological perspective on the expression of information sources, as well as inferences, assumptions, probability and possibility, and gradations of doubt and beliefs in a range of languages. Twelve different languages are investigated, from families including Tibeto-Burman, Nakh-Dagestani, and Austronesian, all of which share the property of requiring the source of information to be specified in every sentence. In these languages, it may not be possible to say merely that ‘the man went fishing’. Instead, the source of evidence for the statement must also be specified, usually through the use of evidential markers. For example, it may be necessary to indicate whether the speaker saw the man go fishing; has simply assumed that the man went fishing; or was told that he went fishing by a third party. Some languages, such as Hinuq and Tatar, distinguish between first-hand and non first-hand information sources; others, such as Ersu, mark three distinct types of information – directly required, inferred or assumed, and reported. Some require an even greater level of specification: Ashéninka Perené, from South America, has a specific marker to express suspicions or misgivings.

This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processesâ whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories—converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.

This history of the Spanish lexicon is written from the interacting perspectives of linguistic and cultural change and in the light of advances in the study of language contact and lexical change. The book describes the language inherited from spoken Latin in the Iberian Peninsula during six centuries of Roman occupation and examines the degree to which it imported words from the languages — of which only Basque survives — of pre-Roman Spain. It then shows how Germanic words were imported either indirectly through Latin or Old French or directly by contact with the Visigoths. The book describes the importation of Arabisms following the eighth-century Arab conquest of Spain, distinguishing those documented in medieval sources from those adopted for everyday use, many of which survive in modern Spanish. It considers the influence of Old French and Old Provençal and identifies late direct and indirect borrowings from Latin, including the Italian elements taken up during the Renaissance. After outlining minor influences from languages such as Flemish, Portuguese, and Catalan, the book examines the effects on the lexicon of contact between Spanish and the indigenous languages of South and Central America, and the impact of contact with English.

The multifaceted notion of gender pervades every aspect of life and of living. Gender differences form the basis for family life, patterns of socialization, distribution of tasks, spheres of responsibility, and occupational predilections. An understanding of the nature of gender is central to many disciplines—social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, criminology, linguistics, and biology, to name a few. The way gender is articulated shapes the world of individuals, and of the societies they live in. Gender has three faces. Linguistic Gender (the original sense of ‘gender’ as a linguistic term) is a feature of many languages which reflects division of nouns into grammatical genders (feminine, masculine, neuter, and so on). Natural Gender (or sex) refers to the division of animates into males and females. Social Gender reflects the social implications, and norms, of being a man or a woman (or perhaps something else). Women and men may talk and behave differently, depending on the conventions within the societies they live in. Their role in language maintenance can also vary. This book focuses on how Gender in its many guises is reflected in the languages of the world, and more specifically, the role of Linguistic Gender in the expression of Social Gender and Natural Gender, and also the role of the three faces of gender in human cognition.

This book offers a comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages (Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish) which takes into account internal dialectal variation. The prosodic analysis of all nine languages has been couched in a common framework, the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the ToBI transcription system, and has been carried out by groups of well-known experts on the prosody of these languages. One of the two noteworthy aspects of the book is the common methodology used in each of the chapters, which was based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The elicited DCT data allow for an analysis of how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means (syntactic constructions, discourse particles) in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence-types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The second important aspect of the book is the fact that the ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language and on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages.

Languages of the Amazon basin are among the most fascinating in the world. This is where one finds unusual sounds, unexpected ways of classifying nouns, elaborate positional verbs, to name just a few features. Most Amazonian languages have been in contact with each other for many generations. Many people are multilingual, and the unusual patterns of multilingualism have given rise to intriguing patterns of language contact, extensive linguistic areas, and numerous features shared due to contact between people There are over 300 languages grouped into over fifteen language families, plus a fair number of isolates. The six major linguistic families of the Amazon basin are Arawak, Tupí, Carib, Panoan, Tucanoan and Macro‐Jê; smaller families include Makú, Guahibo, Yanomami, Witotoan, Zaparoan, Tacana, Harakmbet, Arawá and Chapacuran. Discussion in the book also includes, albeit in more cursory fashion, language families spoken in the areas adjacent to Lowland Amazonia: Chibchan, Barbacoan, Choco, and Guaicuruan. The book starts with a potted history of Amazonian peoples and their languages, and the disastrous effects of the European invasion. After a brief discussion of cultural aspects and people's lifestyle, the profile of each major and minor family are outlined. There is then discussion of the unusual patterns of language contact and multilingual interaction. Further chapters discuss the sounds of Amazonian languages; the ways in which they express possession, gender, and time and tense. In many Amazonian languages one needs to always state how one knows things, known as the category of ‘evidentiality’. Amazonian languages are relatively poor in number words, but rich in elaborate speech styles and means of expression. The book offers extensive examples, many from author's own fieldwork in Amazonia.

This book presents a detailed descriptive and theoretical examination of predicate-argument structure in Niuean, a Polynesian language within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, spoken mainly on the Pacific island of Niue and in New Zealand. Niuean has VSO word order and an ergative case-marking system, both of which raise questions for a subject-predicate view of sentence structure. Working within a broadly Minimalist framework, this volume develops an analysis in which syntactic arguments are not merged locally to their thematic sources, but instead are merged high, above an inverted extended predicate which serves syntactically as the Niuean verb, later undergoing movement into the left periphery of the clause. The thematically lowest argument merges as an absolutive inner subject, with higher arguments merging as applicatives. The proposal relates Niuean word order and ergativity to its isolating morphology, by equating the absence of inflection with the absence of IP in Niuean, which impacts many aspects of its grammar. As well as developing a novel analysis of clause and argument structure, word order, ergative case, and theta role assignment, the volume argues for an expanded understanding of subjecthood. Throughout the volume, many other topics are also treated, such as noun incorporation, word formation, the parallel internal structure of predicates and arguments, null arguments, displacement typology, the role of determiners, and the structure of the left periphery.