This reference grammar is the first description of the endangered Oceanic language Daakaka. This language is spoken by about 1000 speakers on the island of Ambrym, Vanuatu. The data on which the analysis is based were collected by the author during a documentation project between 2009 and 2012. All structural levels of the language are discussed, including discussions of reduplication patterns and orthography design, nominal and verbal subclasses, clause types and information structure and the different types of subordinate clauses. Particular emphasis is given to the intricate system of nominal possession, the system of TAM- and polarity markers and serial verb constructions. Literary genres of the region and related art forms such as songs and the symbolic sand drawings are discussed in the final chapter. The grammar will be especially relevant to readers with an interest in Oceanic languages, general typology and theoretical linguistics as well as those with a broader interest in the region.

This book is a description of Kilmeri, a language of Papua New Guinea, based on the author's fieldwork. The volume is dedicated to the detailed description of form and meaning and their interface, which is supported through extensive illustration by examples. The narrative structure of entire texts is accessible via a small collection of fully glossed personal and traditional stories included in the Online Supplement. The typological evaluation of selected properties of Kilmeri rounds out the description of the language.

Recent research has shown that proper names morphosyntactically differ from common nouns in many ways. However, little is known about the morphological and syntactic/distributional differences between proper names and common nouns in less known (Non)-Indo-European languages. This volume brings together contributions which explore morphosyntactic phenomena such as case marking, gender assignment rules, definiteness marking, and possessive constructions from a synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspective. The languages surveyed include Austronesian languages, Basque, English, German, Hebrew, and Romance languages. The volume contributes to a better understanding not only of the contrasts between proper names and common nouns, but also of formal contrasts between different proper name classes such as personal names, place names, and others.

The topic of the volume is the contrast between borrowable categories and those which resist transfer. Resistance is illustrated for the unattested emergence of grammatical gender, the negligible impact of English and Spanish on the number category in Patagonian Welsh, the reluctance of replicas to borrow English but. MAT-borrowing does not imply the copying of rules as the Spanish function-words in the Chamorro irrealis show. Chamorro and Tetun Dili look similar on account of their contact-induced parallels. The languages of the former USSR have borrowed largely identical sets of conjunctions from Russian, Arabic, and Persian to converge in the domain of clause linkage. Resistance against and susceptibility to transfer call for further investigations to the benefit of language-contact theory.

Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This volume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammarians alike.

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

The endangered languages crisis is widely acknowledged among scholars who deal with languages and indigenous peoples as one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, posing moral, practical, and scientific issues of enormous proportions. Simply put, no area of the world is immune from language endangerment. The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in 39 chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. A comprehensive reference reflecting the breadth of the field, the Handbook presents in detail both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it, and broadens understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, encouraging further research. The Handbook is organized into five parts. Part 1, Endangered Languages, addresses the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part 2, Language Documentation, provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part 3, Language Revitalization, includes approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping ("dormant") languages. Part 4, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment, and the common forces that now threaten the sustainability of their diversity. Part 5, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.

This volume brings together current research in theoretical syntax and its interfaces in the Polynesian language family, with chapters focusing on Hawaiian, Māori, Niuean, Samoan, and Tongan. Languages in this family present multiple characteristics of particular interest for comparative syntactic research, and in recent years, data from Polynesian languages has also contributed to advances in the fields of prosody and semantics, as well as to the study of parametric variation. The chapters in this volume offer in-depth analyses of a range of theoretical issues at the syntax-semantics and syntax-prosody interfaces, both within individual languages and from a comparative Polynesian perspective. They examine key topics including: word order variation, ergativity and case systems, causativization, negation, raising, modality and superlatives, and the left periphery of both the sentential and nominal domains. The findings not only shed light on the theoretical typology of Polynesian languages, but also have implications for linguistic theory as a whole.