You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Languages and Their Speakers provides an introduction both to languages themselves and to their social functions. Written especially for nonlinguistics majors, the book considers how speakers know their languages—know them as grammatical systems and know them as part of a cultural matrix.
This book is the first comprehensive grammatical description of Uchumataqu, the language of the Uru of Lake Titicaca in north-western Bolivia. Uchumataqu forms part of the isolated language family Uru-Chipaya but has been influenced to differing degrees by Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish. The Uchumataqu language became extinct around 1950. Although several researchers had documented the language during the first half of the twentieth century, much of the material remained unstudied. This book is the first to take into consideration every previous study of the Uchumataqu language. The grammatical description is based on former publications and archive material and seeks to describe Uchumataqu as...
In almost every part of the world, minority languages are being threatened with extinction. At the same time, dedicated efforts are being made to document endangered languages, to maintain them, and even to revive once-extinct languages. The book presents a comprehensive overview of language endangerment and revitalization. Among the examined aspects are: degrees of endangerment, definitions of language death, causes of endangerment, types of speakers in endangerment situations, methods of documentation. The book is of interest to a wide readership, including linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators.
This is a reference grammar of the most common syntactic features of a non-Indo-European, unwritten language -- Preface.
This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the...
This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now.
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.
The indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples along Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, once colonized by the British, have long sought to establish their autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant Spanish-influenced regions of the Pacific coast. The book provides a wide overview of the autonomy process by looking at the historical background of autonomy, claims to land and language rights, and land demarcation and communal forestry projects. This book seeks to satisfy the globally emerging interest in the idea of autonomy and bi-zonality as an effective mechanism of conflict resolution and protection of minority rights. The post-Cold War era has witnessed a resurgence of conflictive ethnic and secessionist pol...
It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.
50 year since founding the University of Texas, they have witnessed major evolutions in the world of publishing.