Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Languages of Urban Africa
The Languages of Urban Africa consists of a series of case studies that address four main themes. The first is the history of African urban languages. The second set focus on theoretical issues in the study of African urban languages, exploring the outcomes of intense multilingualism and also the ways in which urban dwellers form their speech communities. The volume then moves on to explore the relationship between language and identity in the urban setting. The final two case studies in the volume address the evolution of urban languages in Africa. This rich set of chapters examine languages and speech communities in ten geographically diverse African urban centres, covering almost all regions of the continent. Half involve Francophone cities, the other half, Anglophone. This exciting volume shows us what the study of urban African languages can tell us about language and about African societies in general. It is essential reading for upper level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in sociolinguistics, especially those interested in the language of Africa.
A Grammar of Fongbe
This book is a reference grammar of Fongbe, a language which is part of the Gbe dialect cluster. It is spoken mainly in the former kingdom of Dahomey, which today comprises the southern areas of Benin and Togo. This book has three objectives: First, its main purpose is to provide a thorough description of the grammar of Fongbe. Second, this book provides language-specific syntactic tests which were developed in the course of this research. Finally, we provide the reader with the most exhaustive list possible of references on Fongbe, and on the Gbe languages in general. This book thus attempts to represent a "state of the art" of the language itself, and of the analyses proposed to account for its particular constructions. This book is of particular interest to Africanists, scholars interested in comparative linguistics or in the reconstruction of language families, and creolists who work on the languages spoken in the Caribbean area.
Bibliography of GBE
None
BIFAD Briefs
None
Word Order in Discourse
This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.
Indefinite Objects
A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects. In Indefinite Objects, Luis López presents a novel approach to the syntax-semantics interface using indefinite noun phrases as a database. Traditional approaches map structural configurations to semantic interpretations directly; López links configuration to a mode of semantic composition, with the latter yielding the interpretation. The polyvalent behavior of indefinites has long been explored by linguists who have been interested in their syntax, semantics, and case morphology, and López's contribution can be seen as a synthesis of findings from several traditions. He argues, first, that scr...
The Languages and Linguistics of Africa
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.
What is Indigenous Knowledge?
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Rethinking Grammaticalization
This volume and its companion one "Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization" offer a selection of papers from the "Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization," held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. From the rich programme of the conference (over 120 papers), the twelve contributions included in this volume were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in grammaticalization and suggest possible directions for future investigations in the field. Combining theoretical discussions with the analysis of particular test cases from a wide range of languages from various language families, the selected papers focus on such central questions as the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization, the distorting effects of grammaticalization on grammar, the areal perspective in grammaticalization and the relevance of contact-induced change to grammaticalization. Other topics discussed include the development of markers of textual connectivity and the emergence of cardinal numerals and numeral systems.
