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Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas — New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address...
The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creole...
The Uralic Languages, second edition, is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Uralic family. The Uralic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from Dalarna County in Sweden to Dudinka, Taimyr, Russia. There are currently approximately 50 languages in the group, the largest one among them being the state languages Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian; other Uralic languages covered in the book are South Saami, Skolt Saami, Võro, Moksha Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Zyrian Komi, Mansi, Khanty, Nganasan, Forest and Tundra Enets, Nenets, and Selkup. The...
This book explores the expression of information source, inferences, assumptions, probability and possibility, and gradations of doubt and beliefs across a wide range of languages in different cultural settings. Like others in the series it will interest both linguists and linguistically-minded anthropologists.
Number is the most underestimated of the grammatical categories. It is deceptively simple yet the number system which philosophers, logicians and many linguists take as the norm - namely the distinction between singular and plural (as in cat versus cats) - is only one of a wide range of possibilities to be found in languages around the world. Some languages, for instance, make more distinctions than English, having three, four or even five different values. Adopting a wide-ranging perspective, Greville Corbett draws on examples from many languages to analyse the possible systems of number. He reveals that the means for signalling number are remarkably varied and are put to a surprising range of special additional uses. By surveying some of the riches of the world s linguistic resources this book makes a major contribution to the typology of categories and demonstrates that languages are much more varied than is generally recognised.
Expressing negation is a universal property of all human languages. There is considerable variation, however, in the exact ways negation materializes cross-linguistically. Strict Negative Concord differs both from the Negative Polarity Item strategy and the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy in that the sentence becomes negative only if the sentence negator is overtly expressed in it, irrespective of how many negative expressions are used. The central aim of this book is to describe Strict Negative Concord in some Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, the volume gives an insight into the forms Strict Negative Concord manifests itself in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian (Slavic), Finnish, Hungarian, Mari (Finno-Ugric) and the closely related Selkup (Samoyedic) to a wide linguistic community. It aims to create a platform for comparison with similar phenomena in well-described European languages.
This study investigates the distribution of linguistic and specifically structural diversity in Northeast Asia (NEA), defined as the region north of the Yellow River and east of the Yenisei. In particular, it analyzes what is called the grammar of questions (GQ), i.e., those aspects of any given language that are specialized for asking questions or regularly combine with these. The bulk of the study is a bottom-up description and comparison of GQs in the languages of NEA. The addition of the phrase and beyond to the title of this study serves two purposes. First, languages such as Turkish and Chuvash are included, despite the fact that they are spoken outside of NEA, since they have ties to ...
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 series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.
This is a Festschrift for Dr. Jack Rueter, compiled on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The book consists of peer-reviewed scientific work by Dr. Rueter’s colleagues. Its contents, compiled by well-established scholars and researchers in NLP, linguistics, philology and digital humanities, pertain to latest advances in natural language processing, to newly developed digital resources, and to endangered languages. Contributions touch upon a wide array of languages such as historical English, Chukchi, Mansi, Erzya, Komi, Finnish, Apurinã, Sign Languages, Sami languages, and Japanese. Most papers present work on endangered languages or on domains with a limited number of resources available for NLP. This book is a tribute to Dr. Rueter’s long career as a true pioneer in the field of digital documentation of endangered languages. His work has always been and remains to be characterized by altruistic thinking and dedication to a greater good in building free and open-source tools and resources for languages which have previously not been afforded such much-needed attention.