In A Grammar of Lopit, Jonathan Moodie and Rosey Billington provide a detailed description of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Lopit, an Eastern Nilotic language traditionally spoken in the Lopit Mountains in South Sudan.

This volume contains 14 descriptive chapters and a collection of 4 transcribed texts in Mursi, a highly endangered language spoken in the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia.

"In A Grammar of Makary Kotoko, Sean Allison provides a thorough description and analysis of Makary Kotoko - a Central Chadic language of Cameroon, framing the discussion within R.M.W. Dixon's (2010a, 2010b, 2012) Basic Linguistic Theory. Working with an extensive corpus of recorded texts supplemented by interactions with native speakers of the language, the author provides the first full grammar of a Kotoko language. The detailed analysis of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse features of Makary Kotoko is from a functional/typological perspective. Being based on a large number of oral texts, the analysis provides an example-rich description showing the range of variation of the constructions presented while giving insights into Kotoko culture"--

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held virtually at the University of California San Diego. There are 21 papers covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, typology and historical linguistics. The volume features a keynote paper that proposes a novel community-based approach to language documentation. African languages investigated in detail include Wolof, Mende, Dangme, Kusaal, Nzema, Anii, Nigerian Pidgin, Tunen, Nyokon, Vale, Lokoya, Lopit, Otuho, Kalenjin, Tiriki, Oromo, Tigrinya, Asá, Qwadza, and Ikalanga.

This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).

The relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation at the articulatory, auditory, acoustic and social level is one of the greatest puzzles in the study of language. Even though plentiful examples exist to suggest that dynamics of synchronic variation and diachronic change are tightly interconnected, a unified theory to account for language change in its relationship to all layers of synchronic variation remains a desideratum. This volume compiles new evidence from articulatory, acoustic, auditory, sociolinguistic, and phonological analyses of segmental and prosodic data and computational modelling, and offers a refreshing theoretical angle on the ongoing debates in language change. The volume is divided into three sections, each focusing on one aspect of speech dynamics – the historical, the emerging and the theoretical, each making a step toward a unified view of speech dynamics at the interface of synchronic variation and diachronic change. The large range of methodologies and theories represented in this book will appeal to scholars from a variety of linguistic fields with an interest in speech dynamics, including phoneticians, phonologists, sociolinguists, typologists, computational and historical linguists.

The strong development in research on grammatical number in recent years has created a need for a unified perspective. The different frameworks, the ramifications of the theoretical questions, and the diversity of phenomena across typological systems, make this a significant challenge. This book addresses the challenge with a series of in-depth analyses of number across a typologically diverse sample, unified by a common set of descriptive and analytic questions from a semantic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse perspective. Each case study is devoted to a single language, or in a few cases to a language group. They are written by specialists who can rely on first-hand data or on material of difficult access, and can place the phenomena in the context of the respective system. The studies are preceded and concluded by critical overviews which frame the discussion and identify the main results and open questions. With specialist chapters breaking new ground, this book will help number specialists relate their results to other theoretical and empirical domains, and it will provide a reliable guide to all linguists and other researchers interested in number.