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This volume contains 14 descriptive chapters and a collection of 4 transcribed texts in Mursi, a highly endangered language spoken in the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia.
While most of the more recent influential work on swearing has concentrated on English and other languages from the Global North, looking at forms and functions of swear words, this contribution redirects the necessary focus onto a sociolinguistics of swearing that puts transgressive practices in non-Western languages into the focus. The transdisciplinary volume contains innovative case studies that address swearing and cursing in parts of the world characterized by consequences of colonialism and increasingly debated inequalities. Turning away from more conventional and established methodologies and theoretical approaches, the book envisages to address transgressive linguistic practices, performances and contexts in Africa, Asia, America and Europe –including individuals' creativity, subversive power and agency. Due to its interdisciplinary and non-mainstream focus, this volume is an essential addition to the field of studies.
This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer ...
The volume explores the integration of language and society as reflected in the grammar of a language. Each language bears an imprint of the society that speaks it; language reflects speakers' relationships with each other, their beliefs, and their ways of viewing the world, as well as other aspects of their social environment, their means of subsistence, and even geographical features of the areas in which the language is spoken. The chapters in this book draw on data from the languages of Australia and New Guinea (Dyirbal and Idi), South America (Chamacoco, Ayoreo, Murui, and Tariana), Asia (Japanese, Brokpa, and Dzongkha), and Africa (Iraqw) to examine the ways in which the grammar of a l...
This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate. It uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations.
This volume examines the concept of 'word' in its many guises and across many languages. 'Word' is a cornerstone for the understanding of any language: it is a pronounceable phonological unit; it has a meaning and a morphological structure and syntactic function; and it exists as a dictionary entry and an orthographic item. Speakers also understand 'word' as a psychological reality: they can talk about the meaning of a word and its suitability in certain social contexts. However, the relationship between the phonological word and grammatical word can be more complex, in that a phonological word can consist of more than one grammatical word, or vice versa. Following an introduction outlining ...
Introduction -- Phonology -- Word Classes -- Noun Phrase Structure -- Possession -- Number -- The Verb and Predicate Structure -- Adjectives -- Valency Changing Operations -- Grammatical Relations -- Comparative Constructions -- Questions -- Negation -- Clause Types, Clause Combining and Coordination -- Appendix: Transcribed Texts.
The book examines the category Number from a variety of linguistic perspectives. Typological aspects of co-plurals and singulatives are introduced and number marking is analysed for three individual languages: Kamas (Samoyedic), Welsh (Celtic) and Wagi (Beria, Saharan). For each language, the focus lies on a different aspect of number marking: In the Wagi dialect of Beria, different tonal patterns are discovered. The extinct Kamas language is analysed in terms of language contact with Russian. Number categories can also serve as a measure of loanword integration, as the study about spoken Welsh shows. The combination of articles in this volume illustrates the potential of number marking and offers insights that contribute our understanding of how grammatical number is applied and categorised in languages.
This book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal structure in any language; however, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the constraints on how verbs combine with noun phrases that refer to participants in the event that they denote or to the circumstances of the event. In this book, Denis Creissels explores and accounts for the extent of this cross-linguistic variation, capturing its regularities and examining the historical phenomena that have resulted in the emergence of constructions and markers. The novel framework developed in the book allows similar phenomena to be identified across typologically diverse languages, and facilitates systematic comparison of the manifestations of these phenomena in the grammars of individual languages.
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