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This book deals with the category of converbs, whose denomination refers to a set of structures which cross-linguistically are not comparable. Specifically, we tackle the following topics: (1) converbs and related constructions as areal features, distinguishing between a general coordinating and subordinating type of converb; (2) converbs in the context of linguistic families, particularly in the Indo-European domain, displaying different non-finite structures to express the adverbial domain; (3) converbial constructions and competing construction types, (4) the diachronic typology of converbs and their source constructions.
Professor Lyle Campbell has had a long and distinguished career and his extensive work on the languages of Mesoamerica have inspired research and researchers. In this volume, contributors come together to present new data, analyses and theoretical perspectives on how understanding language change raises questions for language documentation, description and even revitalization. Coverage ranges from the linguistic isolates Basque and Mapundungun to large families such as Tupian and Austronesian and spans a range of theoretical issues including ongoing language change, etymological opacity, word order, alignment systems and grammatical relations, language contact, onomastics and the study of pre-history. The book shows that linguistic fieldwork, when carried out and used appropriately, allows for a more consistent understanding of language change, and for a better understanding of the ethnographic record. It also explores the junctures between language change, linguistic diversity and other related fields that draw on primary linguistic fieldwork.
Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).
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.
This dissertation addresses the second language (L2) acquisition of word stress in production and perception, from both a phonological-theoretical and psycholinguistic angle. It investigates how cross-linguistic differences in the (types of) metrical systems of native speakers of a variety of first (native) languages (L1) affect the L2 acquisition of word stress. This includes the differences in the formal properties of L1 and L2 stress and the functional properties of L1 stress, and their implications for the representation of stress in the mental lexicon established during the L1 acquisition process. To this end, native speakers of several languages were tested experimentally for their L2 ...
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction, such as lexical semantics, the properties of the antipassive markers, as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars, in particular to those working in the field of language typology, semantics, syntax, and historical linguists, as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.
This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual languages.
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