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At the Foot of the Snows tells the inspiring story of an American family living among the virtually unknown Kham Magar of Nepal, developing a deep bond of friendship that transcended their cultural divide. Through years of study and hard work, they translated Scripture into the Kham language, igniting a spark of interest in the gospel that would fan to life through years of persecution. Through it all, David and Nancy Watters struggled to demonstrate that gospel to these people who lived, in the words of the Khams, "at the foot of the snows."
First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
In The Dura Language: Grammar & Phylogeny Nicolas Schorer provides the definite descriptive account of this hitherto poorly documented language of Lamjung, Nepal. The Dura language is effectively extinct, although attempts at revival may be undertaken by well-intentioned members of Dura ethnicity. On the basis of a comprehensive study and analysis of all of the extant Dura language material, the book outlines the phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, lexical and syntactic properties as well as the phylogenetic position of the language in unprecedented detail. The result of the phylogenetic inquiry will help explain some of the sociocultural realities associated with the Dura community in Nepal and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the linguistic landscape of the Himalayas.
This book is a cross-linguistic examination of the different grammatical means languages employ to represent a general set of semantic relations between clauses. The investigations focus on ways of combining clauses other than through relative and complement clause constructions. These span a number of types of semantic linking. Three, for example, describe varieties of consequence - cause, result, and purpose - which may be illustrated in English by, respectively: Because John has been studying German for years, he speaks it well; John has been studying German for years, thus he speaks it well; and John has been studying German for years, in order that he should speak it well. Syntactic des...
This volume and its companion one "Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization" offer a selection of papers from the "Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization," held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. From the rich programme of the conference (over 120 papers), the twelve contributions included in this volume were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in grammaticalization and suggest possible directions for future investigations in the field. Combining theoretical discussions with the analysis of particular test cases from a wide range of languages from various language families, the selected papers focus on such central questions as the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization, the distorting effects of grammaticalization on grammar, the areal perspective in grammaticalization and the relevance of contact-induced change to grammaticalization. Other topics discussed include the development of markers of textual connectivity and the emergence of cardinal numerals and numeral systems.
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them, both diachronic and synchronic, has multiplied in the last few decades. This volume includes overview articles as well as descriptions of individual languages and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. In addition to a number of modern languages, there are descriptions of several ancient languages.
Multilingualisms vary. Given such variation, how can those from essentially mono-chromatic, monolingual backgrounds begin to appreciate the colorful multilingual realities of the majority world? This question led to the symposium Language and Identity in a Multilingual, Migrating World, May 10–15, 2018, in Penang, Malaysia. This resulting four-part collection of papers. -- J. Stephen Quakenbush
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself. To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respe...
The expression of knowledge in language (i.e. epistemicity) consists of a number of distinct notions and proposed categories that are only partly related to a well explored forms like epistemic modals. The aim of the volume is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of language description and cross-linguistic comparison. As the title of the volume suggests, part of this exploration consists of situating already established notions (such as evidentiality) with the diversity of systems found in individual languages. Epistemic forms that feature in the present volume include ones that signal how speakers claim knowledge based on perceptual-cognitive access (evidentials); the speaker’s involvement as a basis for claiming epistemic authority (egophorics); the distribution of knowledge between the speech-participants where the speaker signals assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge of an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker (engagement marking).