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This book shows that every language has an adjective class and how such classes vary. Thirteen scholars report original research on languages from North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The book throws new light on the nature and classification of adjectives and redefines the cross-linguistic parameters of their variation.
Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on this assumption, the volume presents theoretical and empirical studies that explore the explanatory power of functional-typological linguistics for the investigation of the world's languages.
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Illustrated with rich examples, this book shows how language users can save effort by choosing efficient structures and word order.
Yongning Na, also known as Mosuo, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Southwest China. This book provides a description and analysis of its tone system, progressing from lexical tones towards morphotonology. Tonal changes permeate numerous aspects of the morphosyntax of Yongning Na; they are not the product of a small set of phonological rules, but of a host of rules that are restricted to specific morphosyntactic contexts. Rich morphotonological systems have been reported in this area of Sino-Tibetan, but book-length descriptions remain few. This study of an endangered language contributes to a better understanding of the diversity of prosodic systems in East Asia. The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006.
This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as «cup» in «a cup of tea», classifiers such as «head» in «ten head of cattle», and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components - which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender - and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.
In this book, Cinque takes a generative perspective on typological questions relating to word order and to the syntax of relative clauses. In particular, Cinque looks at: the position of the Head vis à vis the relative clause in relation to the position of the verb vis à vis his object; a general cross-linguistic analysis of correlatives; the need to distinguish a sentence-grammar, from a discourse-grammar, type of non-restrictives (with languages differing as to whether they possess both, one, the other, or neither); a selective type of extraction from relative clauses; and a tentative sketch of a more ample work in progress on a unified analysis of externally headed, internally headed, and headless relative clauses.
This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically 'unbounded' character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inven...
The three-volume set IFIP AICT 368-370 constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th IFIP TC 5, SIG 5.1 International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, CCTA 2011, held in Beijing, China, in October 2011. The 189 revised papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. They cover a wide range of interesting theories and applications of information technology in agriculture, including simulation models and decision-support systems for agricultural production, agricultural product quality testing, traceability and e-commerce technology, the application of information and communication technology in agriculture, and universal information service technology and service systems development in rural areas. The 59 papers included in the third volume focus on simulation, optimization, monitoring, and control technology.
The comparative analysis of historical linguistics focuses on reconstructing ancient patterns based on diachronic records and typological data from several languages or dialects in a language group. The ultimate aim of the comparative reconstruction which requires significant cross-linguistic observation and theoretical reasoning is to demonstrate the historical process of language changes. This book considers the diachronic development of both the Chinese language and the Naxi language, focusing particularly upon six contentious linguistic issues that are associated with various linguistic changes in most areas of the grammar of these languages, including phonological changes, semantic chan...