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The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detai...
This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of varieties of headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families, all Mesoamerican languages spoken in Mexico and Guatemala and one Chibchan language spoken in Honduras. Headless relative clauses are clauses that often resemble interrogative clauses or headed relative clauses in their morpho-syntactic shape, but whose meaning brings them close to nominal constructions. For the vastmajority of the languages in this volume, many of which are endangered and all of which are understudied, the work presented here represents the only published material on the subject.
This work is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This detailed description and analysis includes an overview of the language and its family, its typological features and its phonology. The grammar also provides an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. An agglutinating, polysyn...
"As the first major survey of relative clause structure in the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, this volume comprises a collection of original, in-depth studies of relative constructions in representative languages from across Mexico and Central America, based on empirical data collected by the authors themselves. The studies not only reveal the complex and fascinating nature of relative clauses in the languages in question, but they also shed invaluable light on how Mesoamerica came to be one of the richest and most diverse linguistic areas on our planet. Contributors are: Eric Campbell, Claudine Chamoreau, Lucero Flores Nâajera, Silviano Jimâenez Jimâenez, âOscar Lâopez Nicolâas, Eladio (B'alam) Mateo Toledo, Enrique L. Palancar, and Roberto Zavala Maldonado"--
This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes acr...
Is there a single, Platonic 'reciprocal' meaning found in all languages, or is there a cluster of related concepts which are nonetheless impossible to characterize in any single way? This title develops and explains techniques for tackling this question. It confronts a general problem facing semantic typology.
This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).
The Indigenous Languages of the Americas is a comprehensive assessment of what is known about their history and classification. It identifies gaps in knowledge and resolves controversial issues while making new contributions of its own. The book deals with the major themes involving these languages: classification and history of the Indigenous languages of the Americas; issues involving language names; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified and spurious languages; hypotheses of distant linguistic relationships; linguistic areas; contact languages (pidgins, lingua francas, mixed languages); and loanwords and neologisms.
Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects. This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address fundamental issues in the study of language, such as the nature of linguistic categories, the constitution of function...
An introduction to the complex stories of Mesoamerican divinity through the carvings, ceramics, and metalwork of the Maya Classic period Lives of the Gods reveals how ancient Maya artists evoked a pantheon as rich and complex as the more familiar Greco-Roman, Hindu-Buddhist, and Egyptian deities. Focusing on the period between A.D. 250 and 900, the authors show how this powerful cosmology informed some of the greatest creative achievements of Maya civilization.