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In a number of languages, scattered across the world, every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based--whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from somebody else. Of interest to any grammarian, the book discusses evidentiality, and the cognitive and sociolinguistic consequences of evidentiality in a language.
"The authors range over Ancient Anatolia, Modern Anatolia, Australia, Amazonia, Oceania, Southeast and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The book includes an archaeologist's view on what material evidence offers to explain cultural and linguistic change, and a general discussion of which kinds of linguistic feature can and cannot be borrowed. The chapters are accessibly-written and illustrated by 20 maps. The book will interest all students of the causes and consequences of language change and evolution."--BOOK JACKET.
Every language in the world shares a few common features: we can ask a question, say something belongs to us, and tell someone what to do. But beyond that, our languages are richly and almost infinitely varied: a French speaker can't conceive of a world that isn't split into un and une, male and female, while Estonians have only one word for both men and women: tema. In Dyirbal, an Australian language, things might be masculine, feminine, neuter - or edible vegetable. Every language tells us something about the people who use it. In I Saw the Dog, linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald takes us from the remote swamplands of Papua New Guinea to the university campuses of North America to illuminate the vital importance of names, the value of being able to say exactly what you mean, what language can tell us about what it means to be human - and what we lose when they disappear forever.
This guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia includes some of the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction.
This book is the first exhaustive cross-linguistic study of imperatives and commands. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics, and offers fresh insights on the patterns of human interaction and cognition associated with them.
A comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from the northwest Amazonian jungle.
This book explores the range of noun categorization devices found in the languages of the world, from the extensive systems of numeral classifiers in Southeast Asia to the highly grammaticalized gender agreement classes in Indo-European languages. Almost all languages use some type of noun categorization device in their grammar, with the most widespread being linguistic gender, whereby nouns are classified based on core semantic properties such as sex, animacy, humanness, or shape and size. Numeral classifiers are also common, and classify a noun in terms of its inherent nature, animacy, shape, and form, accompanied by a numeral or a quantifier. Other types of noun categorization devices inc...
Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.
This book explores the expression of information source, inferences, assumptions, probability and possibility, and gradations of doubt and beliefs across a wide range of languages in different cultural settings. Like others in the series it will interest both linguists and linguistically-minded anthropologists.
Distinguished scholars examine the phenomena of passives and causatives in languages from around the world.