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The Kam are still essentially a 'hidden people' - very little has been published in English about them. This book aims to fill a gap in the English literature, by providing a comprehensive introduction to Kam culture. The conclusion looks to the future for the Kam people and their culture.
The Kam language of China possesses fifteen tones – more than any other language. Yet it has long been neglected as an area of research, especially from the perspective of discourse analysis. This study initiates the exploration of the interface between grammar and discourse by examining various aspects of Kam narrative discourse, and using a functional approach to reveal its structural properties. It also introduces the mechanism for phonological and syntactic variations, as well as classifier variants and sentence-final particles (SFPs) in discourse and word order variations. Finally, it discusses the influence of social setting on narrative structure and offers the most up-to-date ethnological and social information about the community.
An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages. This book presents evidence for a universal word order constraint, the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), and discusses the theoretical implications of this phenomenon. FOFC is a syntactic condition that disallows structures where a head-initial phrase is contained in a head-final phrase in the same extended projection/domain. The authors argue that FOFC is a linguistic universal, not just a strong tendency, and not a constraint on processing. They discuss the effects of the universal in various domains, including the noun phrase, the adjective p...
First Published in 2002. Part of the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, this is an in-depth investigation of the effects of duration and sonority on contour tone distribution. The term “tone language” usually refers to languages in which the pitch of a syllable serves lexical or grammatical functions. In some tone languages, the contrastive functions of pitch are sometimes played by pitch changes within a syllable. Pitch changes of this kind are called contour tones. The distribution of contour tones in a language, are when under what phonological contexts contour tones are more readily realized.
A concise introduction to the languages of mainland Southeast Asia that provides a new look at this unique area.
Focussing on music traditions, these essays explore the policy, ideology and practice of preservation and promotion of East Asian intangible cultural heritage. For the first time, Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan - states that were amongst the first to establish legislation and systems for indigenous traditions - are considered together. Calls to preserve the intangible heritage have recently become louder, not least with increasing UNESCO attention. The imperative to preserve is, throughout the region, cast as a way to counter the perceived loss of cultural diversity caused by globalization, modernization, urbanization and the spread of the mass media. Four chapters - one each on China, Korea...
This insider's account is an unparalleled study of the culture in a Kam (Dong) village in Southwest China during the 1930s and 1940s, before Liberation in 1949. It describes the culture objectively and anecdotally, and is distinctive for its honesty and clarity.
The Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a detailed account of the numerous issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics, the area of linguistics most directly concerned with language change as well as past language states. Contains an extensive introduction that places the study of historical linguistics in its proper context within linguistics and the historical sciences in general Covers the methodology of historical linguistics and presents sophisticated overviews of the principles governing phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic change Includes contributions from the leading specialists in the field