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Celebrating Indigenous Voice
Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas — New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address...
Evidentiality, egophoricity and engagement
The expression of knowledge in language (i.e. epistemicity) consists of a number of distinct notions and proposed categories that are only partly related to a well explored forms like epistemic modals. The aim of the volume is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of language description and cross-linguistic comparison. As the title of the volume suggests, part of this exploration consists of situating already established notions (such as evidentiality) with the diversity of systems found in individual languages. Epistemic forms that feature in the present volume include ones that signal how speakers claim knowledge based on perceptual-cognitive access (evidentials); the speaker’s involvement as a basis for claiming epistemic authority (egophorics); the distribution of knowledge between the speech-participants where the speaker signals assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge of an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker (engagement marking).
Quotatives
Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like, Hebrew kazé, Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives a platform to research conducted within different linguistic sub-disciplines and on the basis of a variety of Western and non-Western languages. The introduction presents an overview of forms and functions of old and new quotative constructions. The nine chapters investigate quotation from different perspectives, from conversation analysis over grammaticalization and language variation and change to typological and formal approaches. The collection advocates a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon ‘quotation’, seeking a more nuanced knowledge-base as regards the linguistic properties, social uses and pragmatic functions than monolingual or single disciplinary approaches deliver. The cross-disciplinary nature and the wealth of data make the findings broadly available and relevant.
The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages
The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages is a wide-ranging reference work that explores the more than 550 traditional and new Indigenous languages of Australia. Australian languages have long played an important role in diachronic and synchronic linguistics and are a vital testing ground for linguistic theory. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive and accessible guide to the their vast linguistic diversity. This volume fills that gap, bringing together leading scholars and junior researchers to provide an up-to-date guide to all aspects of the languages of Australia. The chapters in the book explore typology, documentation, and classification; linguistic structures from phonology to pragmatics and discourse; sociolinguistics and language variation; and language in the community. The final part offers grammatical sketches of a selection of languages, sub-groups, and families. At a time when the number of living Australian languages is significantly reduced even compared to twenty year ago, this volume establishes priorities for future linguistic research and contributes to the language expansion and revitalization efforts that are underway.
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.
Baobab
Modern humans, descendants of a founding population that separated from chimpanzees some five to eight million years ago, are today the only living representative of a branching group of African apes called hominins. Because of its extraordinary size and shape, the baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) has long been identified as the most striking tree of Africa’s mosaic savanna, the landscape generally regarded as the environment of hominin evolution. This book makes the case for identifying the baobab as the tree of life in the hunter-gatherer adaptation that was the economic foundation of hominin evolution. The argument is based on the significance of the baobab as a resource-rich environment for the Hadza of northeastern Tanzania, who continue to be successful hunter-gatherers of the African savanna.
Loss and Renewal
Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages Australia is known for its linguistic diversity and extensive contact between languages. This edited volume is the first dedicated to language contact in Australia since colonisation, marking a new era of linguistic work, and contributing new data to theoretical discussions on contact languages and language contact processes. It provides explanations for contemporary contact processes in Australia and much-needed descriptions of contact languages, including pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, contact varieties of English, and restructured Indigenous languages. Analyses of complex and dynamic processes are informed by rich sociolinguistic description.
Fictive Interaction
Language is intimately related to interaction. The question arises: Is the structure of interaction somehow mirrored in language structure and use? This book suggests a positive answer to this question by examining the ubiquitous phenomenon of fictive interaction, in which non-genuine conversational turns appear in discourse, even within clauses, phrases, and lexical items (e.g. “Not happy? Money back! guarantee”). The book is based on a collection of hundreds of examples of fictive interaction at all grammatical levels from a wide variety of spoken, written, and signed languages, and from many different discourse genres. Special attention is devoted to the strategic use of fictive interaction in legal argumentation, with a focus on high-profile criminal trials. Both trial lawyers and lay jurors often present material evidence or murder victims as speaking, and express emotions and intentions in conversational terms. The book thus establishes the role of the conversational turn—rather than the sentence—as the basic unit of language, and the role of conversation as a frame that structures cognition, discourse, and grammar.
Manual of Discourse Traditions in Romance
The series Manuals of Romance Linguistics (MRL) aims to present a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of Romance linguistics. It will comprise approximately 60 volumes that can either be consulted individually or used as a series of books providing a detailed overall picture of the current state of research in Romance linguistics. A special focus will be placed on the presentation and analysis of the smaller languages, the linguae minores.
