A Grammar of Hup

A Grammar of Hup
Title A Grammar of Hup PDF eBook
Author Patience Epps
Publisher Walter de Gruyter
Pages 1009
Release 2008-08-27
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 3110199076

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This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

Adverbial Clauses in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Adverbial Clauses in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Title Adverbial Clauses in Cross-Linguistic Perspective PDF eBook
Author Katja Hetterle
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Pages 353
Release 2015-11-13
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 3110409968

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This study investigates adverbial clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. In line with other recent typological research in the context of complex sentences and clause-linkage, it proceeds from a detailed, multivariate analysis of the morphosyntactic characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny.

Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology

Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology
Title Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology PDF eBook
Author Lars Johanson
Publisher BRILL
Pages 472
Release 2012-07-05
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 9004224076

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Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology puts genealogical and areal explanation for shared morphology in a balanced perspective. Lars Johanson and Martine Robbeets provide nothing less than the foundations for a new perspective on diachronic linguistics between genealogical and areal linguistics.

Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Title Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective PDF eBook
Author Yaron Matras
Publisher Walter de Gruyter
Pages 609
Release 2008-08-27
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 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).

Language Contact and Documentation / Contacto lingüístico y documentación

Language Contact and Documentation / Contacto lingüístico y documentación
Title Language Contact and Documentation / Contacto lingüístico y documentación PDF eBook
Author Bernard Comrie
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Pages 330
Release 2014-12-12
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 3110393557

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The volume is highly relevant to the current regional and international discussion on endangered languages, language contact, documentation and areal typology. The publication is the outcome of a fruitful theoretical and methodological exchange between Latin American scholars and international scholars working in other regions. Most of the papers target Latin American languages. Additionally, new insight into the contact situations in Indonesia, Iran, Australia and Papua New Guinea is provided.

Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content

Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content
Title Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content PDF eBook
Author Friederike Moltmann
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 409
Release 2017-07-03
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 0190666625

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The notion of a propositional content plays a central role in contemporary philosophy of language. Propositional content makes up both the meaning of sentences and the content of propositional attitudes such as belief. One particular view about propositional content has been dominant in analytic philosophy, namely the Fregean conception of propositions as abstract mind-independent objects that come with truth conditions. But propositions in this sense raise a range of issues, which have become a center of debate in current philosophy of language. In particular, how should propositions as abstract objects be understood and how can they represent things and be true or false? A number of philosophers in contemporary analytic philosophy as well as in early analytic philosophy and phenomenology have approached the notion of a propositional content in a different way, not by starting out with an abstract truth berarer, but by focusing on cognitive acts of agents, such as acts of judging. It is in terms of such acts that the notion of a propositional content, on their view, should be understood. The act-based perspective historically goes back to the work of Central European philosophers, in particular that of Husserl, Twardowski, Meinong, and Reinach. However, their work has been unduly neglected and is in fact largely inaccessible to contemporary analytic philosophers. The volume presents a central selection of work of these philosophers that bear on an act-based conception of philosophical content, some of which in new translations (one paper by Reinach), some of which published in English for the very first time (two papers by Twardowski). In addition, the volume presents new work by leading contemporary philosophers of language pursuing or discussing an act-based conception of propositional content. Moreover, the book contains a crosslinguistic study of nominalizations for actions and products, a distinction that plays a central role in the philosophy of language of Twardowski.

Serial Verbs

Serial Verbs
Title Serial Verbs PDF eBook
Author Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 336
Release 2018-10-18
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 0192508776

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This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.