Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied, such as caused motion (e.g., kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g., look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis, a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined, including those spoken in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied, such as caused motion (e.g., kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g., look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis, a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined, including those spoken in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

The idea of this book on "Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description" comes from the observation that, over the last 30 years, much attention has been devoted to the manner/path divide in relation to the distinction between Verb-Framed and Satellite-Framed languages. This mainstream focus has left aside other aspects of motion event descriptions. The chapters of this volume take an in-depth look at three less-studied aspects of motion expression. The first part of the book focuses on directional deixis, especially in relation to associated motion and visual motion. The second part explores variations in Source-Goal asymmetries. The third part investigates different types of motion event constructions, e.g., with various types of co-events. Many languages are taken into consideration throughout the 11 chapters, which gives the volume a clear typological dimension. This book is intended for students and academics interested in motion, spatial semantics, typological variation and cognitive linguistics.

This volume dedicated to Dorit Ravid, offers 29 new chapters on the multiple facets of spoken and written language learning and usage from a group of illustrious scholars and scientists, focusing on typologically different languages and anchored in a variety of communicative settings. The book encompasses five interrelated yet distinct topics. One set of studies is in the field of developmental psycholinguistics, covering the acquisition of lexical and grammatical categories from toddlerhood to adolescence. A second topic involves a section of studies on the interface of cognition and language, with chapters on processing, production, comprehension, teaching and learning language in usage and in historical perspective. A third topic involves a theoretical and applied perspectives on the acquisition and development of literacy competence, including reading, writing, spelling and text production. A fourth topic brings together an array of studies on social, environmental and clinical diversity in language, highlighting novel issues in multilingualism, immigration, language and literacy disorders. Finally, a section of the volume examines in depth questions in Modern Hebrew linguistics, as the home language and launching base of Dorit Ravid’s research work.

This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world’s languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring both their structures and features and their function and use in society. The first part of the volume provides background and general information relating to Ethiopian languages, including their demographic distribution and classification, language policy, scripts and writing, and language endangerment. Subsequent parts are dedicated to the four major language families in Ethiopia - Cushitic, Ethiosemitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic - and contain studies of individual languages, with an initial introductory overview chapter in each part. Both major and less-documented languages are included, ranging from Amharic and Oromo to Zay, Gawwada, and Yemsa. The final part explores languages that are outside of those four families, namely Ethiopian Sign Language, Ethiopian English, and Arabic. With its international team of senior researchers and junior scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages will appeal to anyone interested in the languages of the region and in African linguistics more broadly.

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.