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The essential one-volume resource for advanced students and academics in phonology. >
This book explores the interaction of grammar and context in human communication. Lutz Marten focuses on verbs and verb phrases: he examines the relationship between language rules and linguistic behaviour, seeking to distinguish between language-specific syntactic knowledge and the generalreasoning people need to understand and to make themselves understood. He considers how the component elements of linguistic theory explain what appear to be simple utterances but whose structure is hard to analyse - how, for example, 'Fran is baking Mary a cake in the oven' is different from 'Franis baking Mary a cake in the kitchen'.The author's account of the interactions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is based on extensive observation among contrasting cultures and a variety of languages. He makes important contributions to understanding in all three areas. His book will appeal to linguistic theoreticians of allpersuasions.
Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies in African Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus. The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful typological generalization across languages. Their common aim is to deepen our understanding of whether and how the infor...
This book contains a number of studies on modern approaches to phonological segment structure. There are three main sections: (i) a general section, concerned with the basic theory of segmental structure, features, and the organization of segmental structure into feature-geometric trees, (ii) the representation and behaviour of nasality, and (iii) the representation and behaviour of the laryngeal features.
This book provides thorough descriptive and atheoretical coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. It covers topics such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface.
This book makes an important contribution to the expanding body of work in generative phonology which aims to reduce the number of traditionally recognized melodic categories in order to achieve a greater degree of restrictiveness. By analyzing data from a large number of different languages, Nasukawa establishes a clear affinity between nasality and voicing, and demonstrates the advantages of treating these two properties as different phonetic manifestations of a single nasal-voice category. The choice of whether to interpret this category as voicing or nasality is determined by the active or inactive status of a complement tier; when active, this complement tier enhances the acoustic image of its head category and is interpreted as voicing. This study deepens our understanding of the typological relation between nasality and voicing, and sheds new light on a number of related agreement phenomena such as nasal harmony, postnasal voicing assimilation, voiced-obstruent voicing assimilation and spontaneous prenasalisation.
This book presents a number of studies which focus on the [voice] grammar of Japanese, paying particular attention to historical background, dialectal diversity, phonetic experiment, and phonological analysis. Both voicing processes in consonants (such as Sequential Voicing, or Rendaku) and vowels (such as vowel devoicing) are examined. A number of new analyses are presented, focusing on well-known data that have been controversial in phonological debate in the past, but also presenting new (or rediscovered) data, partly through the work of Japanese scholars that hitherto went mostly unnoticed, partly through new database research, and partly through phonetic experiment.
A revised version of the author's 2001 doctoral dissertation.
This comprehensive book provides a detailed description of the major syntactic structures of Chichewa. Assuming no prior knowledge of current theory, it covers topics such as relative clause and question formation, interactions between tone and syntactic structure, aspects of clause structure such as complementation, and phonetics and phonology. It also provides a detailed account of argument structure, in which the role of verbal suffixation is examined. Sam Mchombo's description is supplemented by observations about how the study of African languages, specifically Bantu languages, has contributed to progress in grammatical theory, including the debates that have raged within linguistic theory about the relationship between syntax and the lexicon, and the contributions of African linguistic structure to the evaluation of competing grammatical theories. Clearly organised and accessible, The Syntax of Chichewa will be an invaluable resource for students interested in linguistic theory and how it can be applied to a specific language.