This book provides a first-ever comprehensive overview of the grammatical structure of Fwe. Fwe is a Bantu language spoken on the border between Zambia and Namibia, by some 20,000 people. Very little previous documentation exists on the language, and the current description of Fwe is based exclusively on newly collected field data. It includes an analysis of the grammatical structure of Fwe, followed by basic cultural information on greetings, a Fwe narrative with its English translation, and a lexicon comprising some 2200 Fwe lexemes with their English translation. This book is intended as a resource for linguists, whether interested in African languages, Bantu languages, language typology, or general linguistics.

This book provides a first-ever comprehensive overview of the grammatical structure of Fwe. Fwe is a Bantu language spoken on the border between Zambia and Namibia, by some 20,000 people. Very little previous documentation exists on the language, and the current description of Fwe is based exclusively on newly collected field data. It includes an analysis of the grammatical structure of Fwe, followed by basic cultural information on greetings, a Fwe narrative with its English translation, and a lexicon comprising some 2200 Fwe lexemes with their English translation. This book is intended as a resource for linguists, whether interested in African languages, Bantu languages, language typology, or general linguistics.

Vamale is an endangered South Oceanic > Northern New Caledonian language, spoken by around 180 people on the northeastern coast of Grande Terre. This grammar was written as a PhD dissertation, on the basis of 11 months of fieldwork funded by ELDP. The data consists both of elicitation and relatively free interviews, as well as recordings of ceremonial speeches and casual conversations. ELAR contains open-access archive of all recordings and a dictionary, as well as a FLEx database in which many examples can be found in context. The appendix includes three texts, an oral history account of the 1917 colonial war, a traditional fable, and a longer modern retelling of a legend. The grammar intends to give a general overview of Vamale to a general linguistics audience. Its focus on syntax, and comparison with related languages should particularly interest Oceanists and areal typologists. With a dedicated chapter on the community's history and cultural information throughout the book, this account hopes to show the beauty and wealth of both the Vamale language and culture.

The approximately 500 Bantu languages spoken across vast areas of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa are united by the presence of a number of broad typological similarities, including, for example, complex noun class system and agglutinative verbal morphology. However, the languages also exhibit a high degree of micro-variation. Recent work has demonstrated fine-grained morphosyntactic variation across many Bantu languages focusing on grammatical topics such as double object constructions, inversion constructions, or object marking, adopting formal, comparative and typological perspectives. Continuing in this vein, this volume builds on the momentum of the dynamic field of morphosyntactic variation in Bantu and contributes to the growing body of work which examines morphosyntactic variation, with a regional focus on the Bantu languages of East Africa. The East African region is characterized by high linguistic complexity in terms of the number of languages spoken, in terms of the four different linguistic phyla present, and in terms of the inherent sociolinguistic dynamics. The current volume explores this complexity further by bringing together studies which investigate features of morphosyntax of an individual language as well as those which develop an in-depth examination of a single morphosyntactic phenomena in a small sample of languages. The book seeks also to add to the descriptive status of the languages under examination, as well as raising questions relating to language, language contact, language change, and micro-variation in related languages spoken in close geographic proximity.

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.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.