Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar, and this book is about a bit of both. The contributions to this volume study possible and sometimes complex ways in which the tones of a language engage in the expression of grammatical categories. There is a widespread conception that tone is a lexical phenomenon only. This is partly a consequence of the main interest in tone coming from phonology, while the main interest in inflection has stemmed from segmental morphology. Similarly, textbooks on inflection and textbooks on tone give very few examples of the inflectional use of tone, and such examples are often the same ones or too similar. This volume aims to broaden our understanding of the link between tone and inflection by showing that there is more to tone than meets the eye. The book includes general chapters as well as case studies on lesser known languages of Asia, Africa and Papua New Guinea, with a special focus on the Oto-Manguean languages, a large and diverse linguistic stock of Mexico that inspired Kenneth Pike’s 1948 seminal work on tone. Most of the contributions to this volume provide first-hand data from recent fieldwork that stems from important language documentation activities.

Papers primarily concerning linguistics of Mexican and Central American Indian languages; some papers deal with Indian languages of other areas, e.g., Argentina and Venezuela, and with Spanish, English, and Australian languages.

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 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).

Language-contact phenomena in Mesoamerica and adjacent regions present an exciting field for research that has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of language contact and the role that it plays in language change. This volume presents and analyzes fresh empirical data from living and/or extinct Mesoamerican languages (from the Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Totonac-Tepehuan and Otomanguean groups), neighboring non-Mesoamerican languages (Apachean, Arawakan, Andean languages), as well as Spanish. Language-contact effects in these diverse languages and language groups are typically analyzed by different subfields of linguistics that do not necessarily interact with one another. It is hoped that this volume, which contains works from different scholarly traditions that represent a variety of approaches to the study of language contact, will contribute to the lessening of this compartmentalization. The volume is relevant to researchers of language contact and contact-induced change and to anyone interested both in the historical development and present features of indigenous languages of the Americas and Latin American Spanish.

Zapotec languages present a wide range of lexical, morphological, phonological, and syntactic means of indicating valence changes. Despite their significant theoretical interest, detailed descriptions of valence-changing phenomena in Zapotec are rare, comparative studies are practically non-existent, and Zapotec contributions to the general typology of valence-changing phenomena still remain largely untapped. The present volume addresses this imbalance by being the first to explore Zapotec valence-changing constructions in depth, and to highlight their broad comparative, typological, and theoretical significance. This book contains both write-ups of contributions to the Special Session on Valence-Changing Devices in Zapotecan (annual meeting of SSILA, 2012) and specially commissioned chapters. It will be of interest to Zapotecanists, Otomangueanists, Mesoamericanists, typologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, and general linguists with an interest in valence-changing phenomena, and may also be used as supplementary reading in field methods and typology courses.