For the thirty-third consecutive year, the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided the major forum for the discussion of linguistic data geared towards understanding how African languages are constituted, acquired and used. This volume represents a selection of 25 peer-reviewed papers from the 33rd AWAL held in March 2002 at Ohio University in Athens. The papers cover language acquisition, syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, as well as language use and function in Africa.

Une source inconnue indique : "This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It covers a wide range of topics, from grammatical sketches of individual languages to sociocultural and extralinguistic issues."

This book introduces beginning students and non-specialists to the diversity and richness of African languages. In addition to providing a solid background to the study of African languages, the book presents linguistic phenomena not found in European languages. A goal of this book is to stimulate interest in African languages and address the question: What makes African languages so fascinating? The orientation adopted throughout the book is a descriptive one, which seeks to characterize African languages in a relatively succinct and neutral manner, and to make the facts accessible to a wide variety of readers. The author’s lengthy acquaintance with the continent and field experiences in western, eastern, and southern Africa allow for both a broad perspective and considerable depth in selected areas. The original examples are often the author’s own but also come from other sources and languages not often referenced in the literature. This text also includes a set of sound files illustrating the phenomena under discussion, be they the clicks of Khoisan, talking drums, or the ideophones (words like English lickety-split) found almost everywhere, which will make this book a valuable resource for teacher and student alike.

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 represents the first comprehensive examination of templatic constructions - namely, linguistic structures involving unexpected linear stipulation - in both morphology and syntax from a typological perspective. It provides a state-of-the-art overview of the previous literature, develops a new typology for categorizing templatic constructions across grammatical domains, and examines their cross-linguistic variation by employing cutting-edge computational methods. It will be of interest to descriptive linguists seeking to gain a better sense of the diversity of the world's templatic constructions, theoretical linguists developing restrictive models of possible templates, and typologists interested in the attested range of patterns of linear stipulation and the application of new kinds of multivariate methods to cross-linguistic data. The new typological framework is illustrated in detail via a number of case studies involving languages of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and numerous other templatic constructions are also considered over the course of the book.

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.

Over the past decade, conducting empirical research in linguistics has become increasingly popular. The first of its kind, this book provides an engaging and practical introduction to this exciting versatile field, providing a comprehensive overview of research aspects in general, and covering a broad range of subdiscipline-specific methodological approaches. Subfields covered include language documentation and descriptive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The book reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each single approach and on how they interact with one-another across the study of language in its many diverse facets. It also includes exercises, example student projects and recommendations for further reading, along with additional online teaching materials. Providing hands-on experience, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this unique and comprehensive guide will give students the inspiration they need to develop their own research projects in empirical linguistics.