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This new introduction to linguistics presents language in all its amazing complexity, while guiding students gently through the basics. Students emerge with an appreciation of the diversity of the world's languages as well as a deeper understanding of the structure of language, and its broader social and cultural context.
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.
Language is a sophisticated tool which we use to communicate in a multitude of ways. Updated and expanded in its second edition, this book introduces language and linguistics - presenting language in all its amazing complexity while systematically guiding you through the basics. The reader will emerge with an appreciation of the diversity of the world's languages, as well as a deeper understanding of the structure of human language, the ways it is used, and its broader social and cultural context. Part I is devoted to the nuts and bolts of language study - speech sounds, sound patterns, sentence structure, and meaning - and includes chapters dedicated to the functional aspects of language: d...
Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical linguistics, and function-based approaches to language description define this volume, as does its foci in two major geographical areas — southeast Asia and northwestern North America. All of the papers appeal, in one way or another, to functional-historical approaches to explanation. Behind this appeal lies an assumption that languages are selective in their development in ways that are dependent upon the communicative tasks to which they are put. As such, language function accounts for both variation and historical development over time.
The sixteen chapters in this volume are written by typologists and typologically oriented field linguists who have completed their Ph.D. theses in the first four years of this millennium. The authors address selected theoretical questions of general linguistic relevance drawing from a wealth of data hitherto unfamiliar to the general linguistic audience. The general aim is to broaden the horizons of typology by revisiting existing typologies with larger language samples, exploring domains not considered in typology before, taking linguistic diversity more seriously, strengthening the connection between typology and areal linguistics, and bridging the gap to other fields, such as historical l...
This book is a grammar of Mangghuer, a Mongolic language spoken by approximately 25,000 people in China's northwestern Qinghai Province. Mangghuer is virtually unknown outside China, and no grammar of Mangghuer has ever been published in any language. The book's primary importance is thus as a systematic grammatical description of a little-known language. The book also makes a significant contribution to comparative Mongolic studies. In addition to the synchronic description of Mangghuer, extensive comparison with other Mongolic languages is included, demonstrating the genetic relationship of Mangghuer within that family. In the course of describing Mangghuer linguistic structures, the book also examines issues of interest to linguistic typologists.
This book contributes to opening up disciplinary knowledge and offering connections between different approaches to language in contemporary linguistics. Rather than focusing on a particular single methodology or theoretical assumption, the volume presents part of the wealth of linguistic knowledge as an intertwined project, which combines numerous practices, positionalities and perspectives. The editors believe ̧ together with the contributors to this volume ̧ that it is a crucial and timely task to emphasize the relevance of linguistic knowledge on power, hospitality, social class, marginalization, mobility, history, secrecy, the structures of discourse, and the construction of meaning, ...