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Hausa is a major world language, spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger, in addition to diaspora communities of traders, Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa, e.g. southern Nigeria, Ghana, and Togo, and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which, together with Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber and Ancient Egyptian, is a coordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar consists of sixteen chapters which together provide a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms, thus guaranteeing its on-going accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.
The volume consists of papers prepared for the International Symposium of Chadic Linguistics (Boulder, Colorado, May 1-2, 1987). Although the papers are representative of the current work being done in the field of Chadic linguistics, they also reflect the current and past interests and methodologies of general linguistics. The papers included in the volume should therefore be of interest to a general linguist as much as to the Chadicist or a specialist in some other Afroasiatic branch. The papers are grouped by the areas of linguistic fields and methodologies. Papers on syntax are followed by papers on morphology, phonology, and methodology of historical reconstruction.
This book reconsiders the classic topics of linguistic analysis and reflects on universal aspects of language from a typological and comparative perspective. The aim is to show the crucial interactions which occur at the different levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and pragmatics), illustrating their various roles in the structural organization of the sentence and exploring how interface relations contribute to yield interpretation in typologically different languages. The structural analysis is set within the Generative framework of grammar, though theoretical tenets are the outcome, rather than the starting point, of a study based on the observation of data. As the b...
Bringing together selected papers from the conference “The Romance Turn VII” held in Venice in October 2015, this volume focuses on a broad range of topics at the heart of the current debate on language acquisition, including clitic pronouns, left-dislocations, passives, relative clauses, and wh-questions. It explores these topics within a range of different acquisition settings, such as L1 and L2 acquisition, bilingualism, typical and atypical development. In addition to syntax, the volume covers other modules of grammar, namely, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, and adds a perspective on language processing to current discussions on the acquisition of Romance languages. This book also includes contributions on atypical language acquisition in cases of deafness and on language intervention based on formal linguistics. It will appeal not only to scholars and students interested in the nature and processes behind first, second and bilingual language acquisition, and impaired language acquisition, but also to language educators and clinicians.
In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance-particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.
The linker introduces ("links") a variety of expressions into the verb phrase, including locatives, the second object of a double object construction, the second object of a causative, instruments, subject matter arguments, and adverbs. This volume collects together Chris Collins's published work on the linker in the Khoisan languages. Here, Collins offers a systematic description of the linker in lHo�, Ju-'hoan, N-uu, and to a lesser extent Xo� and -Xam. For each language, Collins illustrates various uses of the linker, drawing attention to cross-linguistic generalizations as well as to variation between the languages. The work presented in this volume should be of interest to researchers working in a wide variety of syntactic frameworks on different languages of the world.
This book offers a new account of the transitive particle verb construction in English. The main emphasis is on the alternation between the two word orders possible in English (continuous: hand in the manuscript vs. discontinuous: hand the manuscript in). The central aim is to show that the choice of the word order is not optional as has often been claimed in related literature on the topic and that a syntactic analysis should thus not be based on optional movement operations or optional feature selection. The author argues in some detail that the choice of the word order is determined to a great extent by the information structuring of the context in which the relevant construction is embedded. The syntactic structure she develops is based on a substantial combination of empirical facts, evidence from theoretical research and the results of two experimental studies on the intonation patterns of the construction.
This book offers a new account of particle verbs in German and Dutch by looking at the conditions under which a non-morphological structure may exhibit word-like properties. It shows that although particles are represented as phrasal complements of their verbs, they lack the functional structure which is usually associated with phrases. The author uses the concept of a local domain, which can be established by terminal nodes both in syntax and in morphology, to demonstrate why the impoverished syntactic structure of particle verbs shares important features of complex words derived in morphology. The analysis is substantiated through a detailed study of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of particle verbs. Special attention is given to the relevance of local domains for the association of lexical information about sound and meaning with terminal nodes in morphological and syntactic structures.
The two related issues of word order, and subject-verb agreement have occupied center stage in the study of Arabic syntax since the time of Sibawayhi in the eighth century. This book is a contribution to both of these areas. It is grounded within the generative grammar framework in one of its most recent versions, namely Minimalism, as expounded in Chomsky (1995). In this volume, a detailed description is given of word order options in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian Arabic (PA). It is shown that, perhaps surprisingly, the two varieties allow almost the same range of word orders. The important question of whether Arabic has a VP is addressed: the author argues extensively that A...
This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across a wide range of languages. The findings have implications for the study of a variety of crucial issues in linguistic theory, including number marking, partitivity, kind reference, and (in)definiteness marking.