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This book provides thorough descriptive and atheoretical coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. It covers topics such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface.
A Grammar of Upper Tanana is a comprehensive text that performs the impressive task of linguistically rendering a written record of the endangered Upper Tanana language.
In this outstanding book leading scholars from around the world examine the history of linguistics from ancient origins to the present. They consider every aspect of the field from language origins to neurolinguistics, explore linguistic traditions in east and west, chronicle centuries of explanations for language structures, meanings, and usage, and look at how it has been practically applied. The book is organized in six parts. The first looks at the origins of language, the invention of writing, the nature of gesture, and sign languages. Part II examines the history of the analysis and description of sound systems. Part III considers the history of linguistics in China, Korea, Japan, Indi...
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.
This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance through...
The first comprehensive account of Welsh phonology opens with a concise history of the language and its relation to the other Celtic languages. Six chapters then explore its sound system, including the phonetic background, syllables, feet, phonotactics, and stress, and the characteristics of the dialects.
This volume builds on the work of Ilse Laude-Cirtautas (1926-1919), a pioneering Turkologist who introduced the field of comparative Turkic studies to the US in the 1960s. It presents an ongoing dialogue whereby scholars from Central and Inner Asia, and the West engage on issues of Turkic heritage, identity, language and literature. The discussions enrich scholarship in Central and Inner Asian Studies and explore the question "Who are the Turks?"
Scandoromani: Remnants of a Mixed Language is the first, comprehensive, international description of the language of the Swedish and Norwegian Romano, also labeled resande/reisende. The language, an official minority language in Sweden and Norway, has a history in Scandinavia going back to the early 16th century. A mixed language of Romani and Scandinavian, it is spoken today by a vanishingly small population of mainly elderly people. This book is based on in-depth linguistic interviews with two native speakers of different families (one of whom is the co-author) as well as reviews of earlier sources on Scandoromani. The study reveals a number of interesting features of the language, as well as of mixed languages in general. In particular, the study gives support to the model of autonomy of mixed languages.
This monograph deals with binary features in the evolution of human civilisation and cognition, with a particular focus on language. Our life is surrounded by various pairs of binary features, and this is termed binarism in this work. Binarism is pervasive, ranging from nature (biological) to culture (anthropological and archaeological) and, without a doubt, to language. Binarim serves as a good base for further development, and as a system becomes more complex, binarism is broken and more complex systems involving third or fourth options emerge. In the case of language, the earliest human language, as argued here, consisted only of nouns; however, these nouns had a distinction between activ...