Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
New Challenges in Typology
The volume brings together seventeen chapters by typologists and typologically oriented field linguists who have recently completed their Ph.D. theses. Through their case studies of selected theoretically relevant issues the authors highlight the mutual importance of language description, on the one hand, and of cross-linguistically informed theory, on the other. Faced with new data from previously unknown languages and even from lesser-studied varieties of European languages, linguists constantly have to deal with the inadequacy of established concepts and typologies, being pushed to further refine their classifications and to question the accepted borderlines between different categories, ...
New Challenges in Typology
In his (1921) book, Language, Sapir made the famous observation, “All grammars leak” (38). By this he meant that within the systematic paradigms, rules and routinized patterns of any grammar, we always find a few irregularities and surprises. The same can be said for linguistic typologies. Typological theories are critical tools for linguists, for exploring differences and similarities among languages, for learning about the cognitive factors and social practices that make languages the way they are, and for making predictions about other properties of languages that are members of a certain type. So what do we do when a typology leaks? This paper follows the spirit of such work as Aske (1989) on path types and Mithun and Chafe (1999) on grammatical relations types to understand the grammatical and functional motivations of language-internal typological diversity: that is, why and how a single language uses patterns and constructions of more than one type. .
Number Categories
The book examines the category Number from a variety of linguistic perspectives. Typological aspects of co-plurals and singulatives are introduced and number marking is analysed for three individual languages: Kamas (Samoyedic), Welsh (Celtic) and Wagi (Beria, Saharan). For each language, the focus lies on a different aspect of number marking: In the Wagi dialect of Beria, different tonal patterns are discovered. The extinct Kamas language is analysed in terms of language contact with Russian. Number categories can also serve as a measure of loanword integration, as the study about spoken Welsh shows. The combination of articles in this volume illustrates the potential of number marking and offers insights that contribute our understanding of how grammatical number is applied and categorised in languages.
Clause Linkage in the Languages of the Ob-Yenisei Area
The volume explores clause-linkage strategies from a cross-linguistic perspective with an emphasis on asyndetic constructions. The data-driven approaches focus on areal differences and similarities in using non-finite verb forms in complex sentences in languages situated in Central and Western Siberia.
A grammar of Japhug
Japhug is a vulnerable Gyalrongic language, which belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. It is spoken by several thousand speakers in Mbarkham county, Rngaba district, Sichuan province, China. This grammar is the result of nearly 20 years of fieldwork on one variety of Japhug, based on a corpus of narratives and conversations, a large part of which is available from the Pangloss Collection. It covers the whole grammar of the language, and the text examples provide a unique insight into Gyalrong culture. It was written with a general linguistics audience in mind, and should prove useful not only to specialists of Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics and typologists, but also to anthropologists doing research in Gyalrong areas. It is also hoped that some readers will use it to learn Japhug and pursue research on this fascinating language in the future.
A Grammar of Dolgan
The book is the first corpus-based and complete description of Dolgan, a Turkic Language from the Taymyr Peninsula (Russia), analyzing its grammatical structure from a language-internal perspective. It aims at documenting the language and making it accessible for a wide range of potential users.
Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective
The contents of the present volume will enhance our understanding of the diachrony of agreement systems and provide a useful starting point for future studies on this both fascinating and intricate field of research.
Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios
The volume contains a selection of papers originally presented at the symposium on “Areal patterns of grammaticalization and cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization scenarios” held on 12-14 March 2015 at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. The papers, written by leading scholars combining expertise in historical linguistics and grammaticalization research, study variation in grammaticalization scenarios in a variety of language families (Slavic, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Bantu, Mande, "Khoisan", Siouan, and Mayan). The volume stands out in the vast literature on grammaticalization by focusing on variation in grammaticalization scenarios and areal patterns in grammaticalization. Apart from documenting new grammaticalization paths, the volume makes a methodological contribution as it addresses an important question of how to reconcile universal outcomes of grammaticalization processes with the fact that the input to these processes is language-specific and construction-specific.
Non-Finiteness
As a gateway to central questions in linguistics, non-finiteness is unavoidable in both typological studies and aspects of natural language processing, such as text segmentation and annotation. This study presents a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure.
Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity
This work aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Chapters highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it.
