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Evolutionary Linguistics
How did the biological, brain and behavioural structures underlying human language evolve? This is an introduction to the interdisciplinary debates.
One Head, Many Faces
The Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea covers some 30,000 square kilometres of enormously varied landscape. Although it is home to an indigenous population of just 114,000, these people share more than twenty languages. Wider knowledge of the peninsula was recently gained through an extensive interdisciplinary research project (ISIR) involving anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, demographers, geologists, linguists, and specialists in public administration. In analysing the findings of the project, this book provides a systematic comparison with earlier studies, addressing the geological past, the latest archaeological evidence of early human habitation (dating back at least 26,000 y...
Culture and Language Use
The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this second volume reviews basic topics and traditions that place language use in its cultural context. As emphasized in the introduction, and as revealed in the choice of articles, culture is by no means to be seen as standing in opposition to society and cognition; on the contrary, the notion cannot be understood without insight into the intricate interactions of social and cognitive structures and processes. In addition to the topical articles, a number of contributions to this volume is devoted to aspects of methodology. Others highlight the role of eminent scholars who have made the study of cultural dimensions of language use into what it is today."
The Comparative Approach in Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology
Comparison is fundamental to evolutionary anthropology. When scientists study chimpanzee cognition, for example, they compare chimp performance on cognitive tasks to the performance of human children on the same tasks. And when new fossils are found, such as those of the tiny humans of Flores, scientists compare these remains to other fossils and contemporary humans. Comparison provides a way to draw general inferences about the evolution of traits and therefore has long been the cornerstone of efforts to understand biological and cultural diversity. Individual studies of fossilized remains, living species, or human populations are the essential units of analysis in a comparative study; brin...
L2 Acquisition and Creole Genesis
In this volume, second language (L2) acquisition researchers and creolists engage in a dialogue, focusing on processes at work in L2 acquisition and creole genesis. The volume opens with an overview of the relationship between L2 acquisition and pidgins/creoles (Siegel). The first group of papers addresses current language contact at a societal or an individual level (Smith; Terrill and Dunn; Bruhn de Garavito and Atoche; Liceras et al.; Muller). The second section focuses on processes characterizing various stages of L2 acquisition and creole genesis: relexification and transfer from the L1 and their role in the initial state (Sprouse; Schwartz; Kouwenberg; Aboh; Ionin). Chapters in the third section discuss processes involved in developing grammars, namely, reanalysis and restructuring (Sanchez; Brousseau and Nikiema; Steele and Brousseau). The final section concentrates on fossilization and the end state (Cornips and Hulk; Montrul; Lardiere). Between them, the chapters cover lexical, morphological, phonological, semantic and syntactic properties of interlanguage grammars and creole grammars.
Echoes of the Tambaran
In the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea, ritual culture was dominated by the Tambaran --a male tutelary spirit that acted as a social and intellectual guardian or patron to those under its aegis as they made their way through life. To Melanesian scholarship, the cultural and psychological anthropologist, Donald F. Tuzin, was something of a Tambaran, a figure whose brilliant and fine-grained ethnographic project in the Arapesh village of Ilahita was immensely influential within and beyond New Guinea anthropology. Tuzin died in 2007, at the age of 61. In his memory, the editors of this collection commissioned a set of original and thought provoking essays from eminent and accomplished anthropol...
Making Sense of AIDS
In Melanesia, rates of HIV infection are among the highest in the Pacific and increasing rapidly, with grave humanitarian, development, and political implications. There is a great need for social research on HIV/AIDS in the region to provide better insights into the sensitive issues surrounding HIV transmission. This collection, the first book on HIV and AIDS in the Pacific region, gathers together stunning and original accounts of the often surprising ways that people make sense of the AIDS epidemic in various parts of Melanesia. The volume addresses substantive issues concerning AIDS and contemporary sexualities, relations of power, and moralities—themes that provide a powerful backdrop for twenty-first century understandings of the tensions between sexuality, religion, and politics in many parts of the world.
Understanding Language Choices
Understanding Language Choices is an introductory textbook for anyone studying the motivations behind language use choices. It provides an introduction into the numerous factors, both internal and external, influencing such choices in a speech community: language attitudes, language learning, identity, the mobility of the community, and much more. The book also provides a foundation for the study of linguistic variation within a speech community, as well as an introduction to methods of data collection when studying the outcomes of language use choices. An important aspect of this book is its emphasis on a participatory approach to language choice research that empowers the speech community....
A Grammar of Prinmi
A Grammar of Prinmi represents the first in-depth description of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Pǔmǐ Nationality and the Zàng Nationality (in Mùlǐ, Sichuan) in southwest China. Prinmi belongs to the Qiangic branch and is closely related to the extinct language of Tangut. Picus Ding examines in the grammar the phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), morphology, syntax and information structure of Prinmi, with two sample texts and an English-Prinmi glossary provided in appendices. Some noteworthy features of Prinmi include a wealth of clitics (appearing as proclitic, enclitic, mesoclitic or endoclitic), a lexical tone system akin to Japanese, and a collection of existential verbs that discriminates concreteness, animacy, and location.
Issues in Phonological Structure
This volume contains revised, expanded and updated versions of papers originally presented at the International Workshop on Phonological Structure held at the University of Durham in September 1994. As the title suggests, the contributions focus on aspects of phonological structure, both segment internal and suprasegmental. A number of questions surrounding phonological structure are approached from a wide variety of theoretical standpoints, including the frameworks of prosodic phonology, declarative phonology, optimality theory, metrical phonology, government phonology, feature geometry, particle theory and dependency phonology. This range of viewpoints allows the crossfertilisation of various strands of phonological thinking with respect to many of the central issues concerning phonological structure. The empirical basis of the contributions is also wide-ranging, including among the languages dealt with Aranda, Cayuvava, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish.
