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This book explores three central concepts in clausal structure: transivity, valency, and voice. Denis Creissels draws up a novel theoretical and terminological framework to study the considerable cross-linguistic variation observed in these phenomena and to compare their manifestations in the grammars of individual languages.
This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.
This volume presents the first book-length overview of the Atlantic languages, a small family of languages spoken mainly on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Languages in this area have been used in diverse multilingual societies with intense language contact for the whole of their known history, and their genealogical relatedness and the impact of language contact on their lexicon and grammar have been widely debated. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an introduction to language ecologies in the area and includes two accounts of the genealogical classification of Atlantic languages. Chapters in the second part offer grammatical overviews of individual languages, inclu...
The twenty-one papers that make up this volume reflect the broad perspective of African linguistic typology studies today. Where previous volumes would present language material from a very restricted area and perspective, the present contributions reflect the global interest and orientation of current African linguistic studies. The studies are nearly all implicational in nature. Based upon a detailed survey of a particular linguistic phenomenon in a given language or language area conclusions are drawn about the general nature about this phenomenon in the languages of Africa and beyond. They represent as such a first step that may ultimately lead to a more thorough understanding of African linguistic structures. This approach is well justified. Taking the other road, attempting to pick out linguistic details from often fairly superficially documented languages runs the risk that the data and its implications for the structure investigated might be misunderstood. Consequentially only very few studies of this nature giving the very broad perspective, the overview of a particular structure type covering the whole African continent are represented here.
The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the “Third Syntax of the World’s Languages” conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors. All contributions deal with clause combining, focusing on one or both of the following two dimensions of analysis: properties of the clauses involved, types of dependency. The studies are data-driven and have a cross-linguistic or typological orientation. In addition to survey papers the volume contains in-depth studies of particular languages, mostly based on original data collected in recent field work.
The morphological process of reduplication occurs in languages throughout the world. Reduplication in indigenous languages of South America is the first volume to focus on reduplication in South America. The indigenous languages of South America remain under-documented and little accessible to theoretical linguistics. Most regions and language families of the continent are represented in articles based on recent fieldwork by the authors. Included are data concerning a diverse set of reduplication phenomena from the Andes, Amazonia, and other regions of the continent. A wide range of language families and isolates are discussed, such as Tupian, Quechuan, Mapuche, Tacanan, Arawakan, Barbacoan, and Macro-Jê. Several languages present unusual properties, some of which violate presumed universals, such as no partial without full reduplication.
This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.
This volume seeks to reevaluate the nature of tone-segment interactions in phonology. The contributions address, among other things, the following basic questions: what tone-segment interactions exist, and how can the facts be incorporated into phonological theory? Are interactions between tones and vowel quality really universally absent? What types of tone-consonant interactions do we find across languages? What is the relation between diachrony and synchrony in relevant processes? The contributions discuss data from various types of languages where tonal information plays a lexically distinctive role, from ‘pure’ tone languages to so-called tone accent systems, where the occurrence of contrastive tonal melodies is restricted to stressed syllables. The volume has an empirical emphasis on Franconian dialects in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, but also discusses languages as diverse as Slovenian, Livonian, Fuzhou Chinese, and Xhosa.
This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents, arose from the conference on ditransitive constructions held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) in 2007. It opens with the editors' survey article providing an overview of cross-linguistic variation in ditransitive ...
Recent studies on the syntax and semantics of complex sentences have dealt with several challenges to the traditional boundaries between coordination and subordination. Some constructions belong to one of the two types according to syntactic criteria but relate to the other type on semantic grounds, whereas other constructions are not compatible with either the canonical syntactic or semantic tests traditionally employed to establish this distinction. Other constructions, by contrast, seem to have evolved in such a way that they now cross the divide between both types. The collection of papers in this volume delves further into the theoretical implications of previous analyses and focuses on a wide array of data from different languages, taking those challenges as a point of departure to develop innovative perspectives and to advance thought-provoking ideas.