A Reference Grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian Language of Taiwan

A Reference Grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian Language of Taiwan
Title A Reference Grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian Language of Taiwan PDF eBook
Author Stacy Fang-Ching Teng
Publisher Pacific Linguistics
Pages 340
Release 2008
Genre Foreign Language Study
ISBN

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"The Puyuma people reside in southeastern Taiwan in Taitung City and Peinan Township in Taitung County. There are still fourteen extant Formosan (Austronesian) languages in Taiwan, but only thirteen indigenous groups are officially recognised by the Taiwanese government. The present study investigates the Nanwang dialect of the Puyuma language, spoken by the people in Nanwang and Paoshang Suburbs of Taitung City in southern Taiwan. The aim of this grammar is to describe the phonology and morphosyntax of Puyuma. The work is descriptive in nature, and the theoretical framework employed is Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT). BLT emphasises the need to describe each language in its own terms, rather than imposing on it concepts derived from other languages. Thus, in this study, the author abandons traditional terms used by linguists studying Philippine-type languages, such as agent focus, patient focus, locative focus, or instrumental focus, and replaces them with the terms like transitive and intransitive that are more familiar to most of the worlds linguists."--Provided by publisher.

Prominence in Austronesian

Prominence in Austronesian
Title Prominence in Austronesian PDF eBook
Author Bethwyn Evans
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Pages 338
Release 2024-01-29
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 3110730758

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The cognitive concept of prominence is increasingly seen as key to understanding the organisation of grammar. This volume explores the encoding of prominence in languages from across the Austronesian family. The contributions show how prominence is relevant to understanding asymmetries at different levels of grammatical structure, from discourse and information structure to argument expression and socio-pragmatics. Moreover, common themes across contributions point to crosslinguistic tendencies that underpin the conventionalisation of communicative patterns for coordinating interlocutors' attention, and to points of departure for further crosslinguistic exploration of how grammatical asymmetries can be explained in terms of prominence.

The Syntax of Yes and No

The Syntax of Yes and No
Title The Syntax of Yes and No PDF eBook
Author Anders Holmberg
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 263
Release 2016
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 0198701853

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This book is a cross-linguistic study of the syntax of yes-no questions and their answers, drawing on data from a wide range of languages with particular focus on English, Finnish, Swedish, Thai, and Chinese. There are broadly two types of answer to yes-no questions: those that employ particles such as 'yes' and 'no' (as found in English) and those that echo a part of the question, usually the finite verb, with or without negation (as found in Finnish). The latter are uncontroversially derived by ellipsis, while the former have been claimed to be clause substitutes. Anders Holmberg argues instead that even answers that employ particles are complete sentences, derived by ellipsis from full sentential expressions, and that the two types share essential syntactic properties. The book also examines the related cross-linguistic and intralinguistic variation observed in answers to negative questions such as 'does he not drink coffee?', whereby 'yes' in one language appears to correspond to 'no' in another. The book illustrates how a seemingly trivial phenomenon can have the most wide-ranging consequences for theories of language, and will be of interest not only to theoretical linguists but also to students and scholars of typological and descriptive linguistics.

Nanwang Puyuma-English Dictionary

Nanwang Puyuma-English Dictionary
Title Nanwang Puyuma-English Dictionary PDF eBook
Author Josiane Cauquelin
Publisher
Pages 582
Release 2015
Genre Puyuma language
ISBN

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Endangered Languages of Austronesia

Endangered Languages of Austronesia
Title Endangered Languages of Austronesia PDF eBook
Author Margaret Florey
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 319
Release 2010
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 0199544549

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This book explores the challenges to linguistic vitality confronting many minority languages in the highly diverse and geographically far-flung Austronesian language family. The contributions bring together Indigenous language activists and academic researchers with a long-standing commitment to language documentation.

Historical Linguistics 2013

Historical Linguistics 2013
Title Historical Linguistics 2013 PDF eBook
Author Dag T.T. Haug
Publisher John Benjamins Publishing Company
Pages 339
Release 2015-09-15
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 9027268185

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The International Conference on Historical Linguistics is the main conference for specialists in language change, and the 2013 conference in Oslo drew more than 300 participants, with 182 papers presented in the general session. The 16 papers selected for inclusion in this volume from the general session of ICHL 2013 not only provide a clear picture of the state of the art in various subfields of historical linguistics but also present recent insights in diachronic phonology, typology, morphology and morphosyntax. The languages and families covered include English, German, Scandinavian, French, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Old Japanese and Austronesian. The volume will be useful to any linguist with an interest in diachronic matters as well as general linguistic theory.

Historical Linguistics 2011

Historical Linguistics 2011
Title Historical Linguistics 2011 PDF eBook
Author Ritsuko Kikusawa
Publisher John Benjamins Publishing
Pages 349
Release 2013-11-14
Genre Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN 9027271194

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This volume of selected papers from the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Osaka, Japan, July 2011) presents a set of stimulating and ground-breaking studies on a wide range of languages and language families. As the scope of studies that can be characterized as ‘Historical Linguistics’ has expanded, ICHL conferences have likewise seen a broadening of topics presented, and this conference was no exception, reflected by the inclusion in this volume of a plenary presentation on the grammaticalization of expressions of negation and gendered kinship in American Sign Language. Three other papers propose new views of the role of grammaticalization in English, Chinese, and Niger-Congo languages. Four of the papers discuss specific problems that arise in the comparison and reconstruction of linguistic features in a range of languages from Asia, Europe and South America. The last six studies deal with innovative approaches to the historical development of suppletion in Romance languages, possessive classifiers in Austronesian, universal quantifiers in Germanic, adjectival sequences in English, exaptation in Celtic and Early English, and drift in Ancient Egyptian.