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Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twent...
In his (1921) book, Language, Sapir made the famous observation, “All grammars leak” (38). By this he meant that within the systematic paradigms, rules and routinized patterns of any grammar, we always find a few irregularities and surprises. The same can be said for linguistic typologies. Typological theories are critical tools for linguists, for exploring differences and similarities among languages, for learning about the cognitive factors and social practices that make languages the way they are, and for making predictions about other properties of languages that are members of a certain type. So what do we do when a typology leaks? This paper follows the spirit of such work as Aske (1989) on path types and Mithun and Chafe (1999) on grammatical relations types to understand the grammatical and functional motivations of language-internal typological diversity: that is, why and how a single language uses patterns and constructions of more than one type. .
A new theory of argument structure, based on the syntactic operation Merge and presented through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. In Principles of Argument Structure, Chris Collins investigates principles of argument structure in minimalist syntax through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. He formulates a new theory of argument structure based on the only structure-building operation in minimalist syntax, Merge, which puts together two syntactic objects to form a larger one. This new theory should give rise to detailed cross-linguistic work on the syntactic and semantic properties of implicit arguments. Collins prese...
This is the first broad, detailed grammar of the Giziga language, which belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The language is spoken in parts of the Far North Region of the Republic of Cameroon and can be divided into two dialects, Giziga and Northern Giziga, with about 80,000 native speakers in total. This volume describes the Giziga dialect, occasionally referring to the Northern variety, and aims to provide new information about this and other Afro-Asiatic languages for further research in linguistics, history, anthropology, sociology and related fields. The book will also be a tool helping Giziga speakers preserve their language, history and culture for future generations.
This book offers a comprehensive examination of Present Time Expressions (PTEs), illustrating how a more informed understanding of their semantic and pragmatic representations can offer unique insights into the temporal systems of languages. The volume takes as its point of departure the notion that tenses, aspectual viewpoint markers, and temporal expressions have a semantic meaning, which is further pragmatically enriched and manipulated in use by speakers. Building on this foundation, the book introduces current theories on the linguistic expression of temporality toward better highlighting the need for further understanding of PTEs, encompassing tenses of the present and words such as ...
This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax, as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese syntax, grouped into five thematic sections on the structure of lexical and functional projections, modal verb syntax, syntax-semantics interactions, the syntax and interpretation of particles, and the acquisition of syntactic structures. With its rich descriptive content sourced from different varieties of Chinese, and its theoretical orientation and analyses, the book provides an important new resource both for researchers with a primary interest in Chinese and other linguists interested in discovering how properties of Chinese can inform the analysis of other languages.
This volume presents an up-to-date cognitive-linguistic account of the Finnish cases that would serve the interests of an international audience. As the Finnish linguistic tradition has always considered grammatical cases to be meaningful elements, this volume also addresses the extensive work by earlier scholars from different theoretical backgrounds. The volume consists of an introduction and eleven articles. The introduction presents the system of Finnish cases and provides a brief overview of the main tenets of cognitive linguistics, offering guidance for those readers who are not familiar with cognitive linguistics. Some articles focus on one case and present a unified account of its functions, others analyse a larger group of cases that form a system (the local cases), whereas yet others address the use of cases in certain constructions (such as expressions of change). This collection of articles also discusses more general topics, such as the notion of case, questions of polysemy, the traditional division of cases into grammatical and semantic, the relationship between inflection and derivation, and the role of inflection in the categories of adpositions and adverbs.
Der Faschismus des 20. Jahrhunderts hat die jüdische Kultur in Europa in ihrer ursprünglichen Form und Verbreitung weitgehend zerstört. Die Überlebenden brachten ihre Kultur in neue Umgebungen, wo sie teilweise wiederbelebt wurde. Auch die Sprachen fielen dem zum Opfer oder wurden im Zuge der Assimilation und Akkulturation aufgegeben oder zumindest durch die verschiedenen neuen Kontaktsituationen stark beeinflusst. Als in den 1950er Jahren absehbar war, dass viele Überlebende, die in den alten europäischen Territorien aufgewachsen waren, ihre Muttersprache nicht an ihre Kinder und Enkel weitergeben würden, erkannte Uriel Weinreich die Notwendigkeit und Chance, Sprache und Kultur diese...
Complex predicates can be loosely defined as a sequence of items that behave as a single predicate, projecting a single argument structure within a clause. Each of the members of the predicate contributes part of the information ordinarily associated with a single head. The present volume presents a collection of theoretical linguistic results on the study of complex predicates in different perspectives and with a variety of approaches. Important empirical and theoretical issues cutting across various subfields of linguistics are being addressed in this book, such as: • Syntactic and semantic modeling of complex predicate formation: compositionality, argument structure, event structure. • Differences between syntactic and morphological processes of lexeme formation. • Typological and diachronic issues in complex predicate formation. • Neo-Davidsonian analyses of abstract predicate decomposition and its morphological correlates. Contributors are: Ane Berro, Denis Creissels, Hannah Gibson, Adele Goldberg, Lutz Marten, Annie Montaut, Léa Nash, Pooja Paul, Pollet Samvelian, Peter Svenonius, and Susanne Wurmbrand.
After more than three decades of research on secondary predication, there has not been a book which examines the syntactic and semantic mechanisms of secondary predication in East Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian and Korean – until now. Shibagaki’s lucid and impartial survey should prove of great value to people interested in the study of not only secondary predication, but also the theories of syntax and semantics.