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This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in...
Not only is May otherwise undescribed in writing, it is the only small Vietic language documented and analysed in such detail, and one of few endangered Austroasiatic languages described so thoroughly. May is predominantly monosyllabic, yet retains traces of affixes and consonant clusters that reflect older disyllabic forms. It is tonal, and also manifests breathy phonation and vowel ongliding, yielding a remarkable complexity of syllable types. The lexicon, which is extensively documented, has a substantial archaic component. Consequently, the volume provides an invaluable resource for comparative historical and typological studies. This book is an English translation of the 2018 Russian language monograph by Babaev and Samarina.
Akabea is one of the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, and is also the name of the people who spoke it. The Akabea lived as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British developed a penal colony on the Andaman Islands. This led to the introduction of diseases to which the indigenous inhabitants had no natural immunity and caused a demographic collapse; the last member of the Akabea tribe died some time between the 1921 and 1931 censures. There are two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands, Great Andamanese (to which Akabea belongs) and Ongan. The former is now represented by only a handful of people who reme...
A collection of papers dealing with issues in the 'Mainland Austronesian Languages', Chamic, Acehnese and Moken/Moklen - not a single genetic sub-grouping but a number of related languages that have undergone parallel typological restructuring away from their Austronesian heritage, converging on a type that places them on the southern periphery of the broader Mainland Southeast Asian Linguistic Area . In prehistoric times speakers of these languages migrated to the Asian mainland from insular Southeast Asia . Over many years of independent development plus prolonged contact with mainland languages, they have shifted typologically, particularly towards reduced word structure, increased phoneme inventory, and more isolating syntax. The emphasis of the papers is on historical change, particularly in respect of lexical borrowings and the evolution of phonological systems.
This volume focuses on the theoretical and analytical challenges that languages with complex morphologies pose for the theory and typology of word-level prosodic phenomena. The morphological complexity and phonological length that are characteristic of words in these languages make them a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of prominence. The first three chapters in the volume explore general theoretical issues pertaining to word prominence in synthetic languages, including the issue of 'wordhood' and the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues with delineating word-level prominence and the high...
This book provides a detailed comparative overview of an array of elaborate grammatical resources used in Southeast Asian languages.
This book gives readers a present and critical view of different language and linguistic issues in selected Asian contexts. The language aspect of the manuscript explores various areas of English language learning and teaching while the linguistic aspect looks at different fields such as sociolinguistics, semantics, stylistics, corpus-based studies, translation studies and cultural studies. These aspects also provide distinct tangents in researching language for they offer significant points of view and outcomes in understanding the influence and/or the function of cultures when dealing with either spoken or written discourses involving native or non-native speakers. Such dynamics are instrumental in bringing about wider range of topics pertinent to the transdisciplinary nature of the current research theme in this part of the world. Substantially, the major sub-disciplines included in the manuscript frame both theoretical and hands-on implications for more rigourous innovations and expansions in the respective area of investigation.
The Handbook of the Austroasiatic Languages is the first comprehensive reference work on this important language family of South and Southeast Asia. Austroasiatic languages are spoken by more than 100 million people, from central India to Vietnam, from Malaysia to Southern China, including national language Cambodian and Vietnamese, and more than 130 minority communities, large and small. The handbook comprises two parts, Overviews and Grammar Sketches: Part 1) The overview chapters cover typology, classification, historical reconstruction, plus a special overview of the Munda languages. Part 2) Some 27 scholars present grammar sketches of 21 languages, representing 12 of the 13 branches. The sketches are carefully prepared according to the editors’ unifying typological approach, ensuring analytical and notational comparability throughout.
Alongside considerable continuity, 20th-century diachronic linguistics has seen substantial shifts in outlook and procedure from the 19th-century paradigm. Our understanding of what is really new and what is recycled owes a great debt to E. F. K. Koerner's minutely researched interpretations of the work of the field's founders and key transitional figures. At the cusp of the 21st century, some of the best known scholars in the field explore how these methodological shifts have been and continue to be played out in historical Romance, Germanic and Indo-European linguistics, as well as in work outside these traditional areas. These 22 studies, honouring the founder of "Diachronica" and other publication ventures that have helped revitalize historical enquiry in recent decades, include examinations of Indo-European methodology and the reconstructions carried out by Bloomfield and Sapir; the search for relatives of Indo-European; comparative, structural and sociolinguistic analyses of the history of the Romance languages; regular vs. morpholexical approaches to OHG umlaut; and the synchrony and diachrony of gender affixes in Tsez.