Includes chapters on Athapascan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Eskimo and Chukchee. (AB1739).

Includes chapters on Athapascan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Eskimo and Chukchee.

The works of Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939) continue to provide inspiration to all interested in the study of human language. Since most of his published works are relatively inaccessible, and valuable unpublished material has been found, the preparation of a complete edition of all his published and unpublished works was long overdue. The wide range of Sapir's scholarship as well as the amount of work necessary to put the unpublished manuscripts into publishable form pose unique challenges for the editors. Many scholars from a variety of fields as well as American Indian language specialists are providing significant assistance in the making of this multi-volume series.

In their subject matter and in their theoretical orientation all the papers in this volume reflect the powerful influence of T. Givón. Most of them deal with questions of morphosyntactic typology, pragmatics, and grammaticalization theory. Many of them are directly based on extensive fieldwork on local languages of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Others are based on statistical analyses of extensive written and spoken corpora of texts.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward Sapir (1884-1939) a conference was held in the Victoria Memorial Museum, Ottawa, Canada, where Sapir had his office for most of his time as Chief of the Anthropological Division of the Geographical Survey of Canada (1910-1925). This volume presents papers from that conference.