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.

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.

Like its companion volume, this book offers a detailed description and comparison of three major structural-functional theories: Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar, illustrated throughout with corpus-derived examples from English and other languages. Whereas Part 1 confines itself largely to the simplex clause, Part 2 moves from the clause towards the discourse and its context. The first three chapters deal with the areas of illocution, information structuring (topic and focus, theme and rheme, given and new information, etc.), and clause combining within complex sentences. Chapter 4 examines approaches to discourse, text and context across the three theories. The fifth chapter deals with the learning of language by both native and non-native speakers, and applications of the theories in stylistics, computational linguistics, translation and contrastive studies, and language pathology. The final chapter assesses the extent to which each theory attains the goals it sets for itself, and then outlines a programme for the development of an integrated approach responding to a range of criteria of descriptive and explanatory adequacy.

The object of this volume is the study of missionary translation practices which occur within a colonial context of political domination and spiritual conquest. Missionary translation becomes especially manifest in bilingual ethnographic descriptions, in (bilingual) catechisms and in the missionaries’ lexicographic condensation of bilingual dictionaries. The study of these instances permits the analysis and interpretation of their guiding principles, their translation practice and underlying reasoning. It also permits the modern linguist to discern semantic changes that can be revealed in these missionary translations over certain periods. Up to now there has hardly been any study available that focuses on translation in missionary sources, of the different traditions in the Americas or Asia. This book will fill this gap, addressing the legacy of missionary translation practices and theories, the role of translation in evangelization and its particular form in the context of colonialism, the creation of loans from Spanish or Latin or equivalents or paraphrases in the indigenous languages in texts and dictionaries as translation strategies followed in bilingual editions. The process of acculturation and transculturation imposed by European religious systems is noted. This volume presents research on languages such as Nahuatl, Tarascan (Pur’épecha), Zapotec, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Pangasinán, and other Austronesian languages from the Philippines.