Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia explores the intricacies of the grammars of several of the languages of the South Asian subcontinent. Specifically, the contributors to this volume examine grammatical resources for shaping elaborative, rhyming, and alliterative expressions, conveying the emotions, states, conditions and perceptions of speakers. These forms, often referred to expressives, remain relatively undocumented, until now. It is clear from the evidence on contextualized language use that the grammatically artistic usage of these forms enriches and enlivens both every day and ritualized genres of discourse. The contributors to this volume provide grammatical and sociolinguistic documentation through a typological introduction to the diversity of expressive forms in the languages of South Asia. This book is suitable for students and researchers in South Asian Languages, and language families of the following; Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic.

This volume provides a first of its kind account of expressives in the region from a grammatical, historical, and literary perspective. It provides case studies from the four major language families of South Asia.

Providing extensive data on a range of European languages, this book highlights the key role expressivity plays in all language.

This edited volume on Munda linguistics makes an important contribution in terms of analysing and demonstrating key issues such as Proto-Munda reconstruction, migration of Munda language speakers, and synchronic linguistic issues in Munda languages spoken in India. The contributions here reflect the diverse range of scholarship on Munda languages which combines empirical and theoretical discussion; the volume will be an extremely useful reference after a long gap in research on Munda languages and it will be useful not only for scholars interested in research on Munda languages, but also to those interested in typological studies and in documentary and field linguistics more generally. Moreover, this will be a major contribution to the understanding of the cultural and linguistic dynamics of South Asia as a linguistic area.

This book provides a detailed comparative overview of an array of elaborate grammatical resources used in Southeast Asian languages.

As “reduplication” is a continuously discussed topic in the field of linguistic typology and morphology there is still the need to reach a deeper understanding of reduplicative processes. This volume aims to explore the boundaries of reduplication proper from an outside angle, i.e. by looking into non-prototypical cases which challenge the formal and functional criteria for reduplication proper. The articles selected cover various linguistic areals from Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. Abbi explores echo formations and reduplicative expressives in Southeast Asia. Anderson presents an in-depth study on various reduplication phenomena in the Munda language family. Nintemann addresses a formal problem of reduplication proper in Bantu languages. Finkbeiner discusses a case of triplication in German, contrasting it with the framework of reduplication. Kallergi & Konstantinidou provide an detailed insight into several kinds of echo formations in Modern Greek, including diachronic aspects. Rozhanskiy’s focus is on unexpected reduplicative patterns found in the formation of Komi ideophones. Stolz delivers a thorough crosslinguistic investigation on reduplicative phenomena, favouring the canonical approach over the prototype method.

This book explores the dynamics of language changes from sociolinguistic and historical linguistic perspectives. With in-depth case studies from all around the world, it uses diverse approaches across sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to answer questions such as: How and why do language changes begin?; how do language changes spread?; and how can they ultimately be explained? Each chapter explores a different component of language change, including typology, syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, lexicology, discourse strategies, diachronic change, synchronic change, how the deafblind modify sign language, and the accommodation of language to song. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of language change over time, simultaneously advancing current research and suggesting new directions in sociolinguistic and historical linguistic approaches.