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Many descriptive grammars report the use of a linguistic pattern at the interface between discourse and syntax which is known generally as tail-head linkage. This volume takes an unprecedented look at this type of linkage across languages and shows that there exist three distinct variants, all subsumed under the hypernym bridging constructions. The chapters highlight the defining features of these constructions in the grammar and their functional properties in discourse. The volume reveals that: Bridging constructions consist of two clauses: a reference clause and a bridging clause. Across languages, bridging clauses can be subordinated clauses, reduced main clauses, or main clauses with con...
The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families ...
The languages of the world make use of a variety of techniques for describing events and putting sentences together. This volume takes a typological approach to clause chaining, a fascinating feature of the grammar of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, East Africa, across Central Asia, and the Americas. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, and are used to organize discourse and to foreground or background events and participants; they often go together with switch-reference marking, an indication of whether upcoming subjects will be co-referential with preceding subjects or not. The introductory chapter features a d...
This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.
"Based around seven primary texts spanning 130 years, this volume explores the conceptual boundaries of structuralism [...]. The texts are made accessible to present-day English-speaking readers through translation and extensive critical notes; each text is also accompanied by a detailed introduction that places it in its intellectual and historical context and outlines the insights it contains"--Jacket.
Scripture Frames & Framing: A Workbook for Bible Translators illustrates and further develops some of the key ideas presented in the influential text Bible Translation: Frames of Reference (T. Wilt, ed., St Jerome, 2003). This workbook offers numerous exercises for analysing biblical texts and communicating them to contemporary audiences. The workbook proceeds by briefly introducing a key aspect of translation, giving exercises that will help clarify understanding of that aspect and of how it relates to translators? particular communication situations, and then moving on to a related aspect.
This volume focuses on the form and the function of commands-directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders-from a typological perspective. Authors analyse the marking and meaning of commands in a range of typologically diverse languages on the basis of extensive fieldwork and in a way that allows useful comparison.
Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This can be done through lexical means, and through grammatical evidentials. The studies presented here focus on the experssions of perception and cognition in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America.
This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repe...
Times are changing, and with them, the norms and notions of correctness. Despite a wide-spread belief that the Bible, as a “sacred original,” only allows one translation, if any, new translations are constantly produced and published for all kinds of audiences and purposes. The various paradigms marked by the theological, political, and historical correctness of the time, group, and identity and bound to certain ethics and axiomatic norms are reflected in almost every current translation project. Like its predecessor, the current volume brings together scholars working at the intersection of Translation Studies, Bible Studies, and Theology, all of which share a special point of interest concerning the status of the Scriptures as texts fundamentally based on the act of translation and its recurring character. It aims to breathe new life into Bible translation studies, unlock new perspectives and vistas of the field, and present a bigger picture of how Bible [re]translation works in society today.