This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Makú or Vaupés-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun ‘stick, tree’. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

The collection of articles presented in this volume addresses a number of general theoretical, methodological and empirical issues in the field of Historical Linguistics, in different levels of analysis and on different themes: (i) phonology, (ii) morphology, (iii) morphosyntax, (iv) syntax, (v) diachronic typology, (vi) semantics and pragmatics, and (vii) language contact, variation and diffusion. The topics discussed, often in a comparative perspective, feature a variety of languages and language families and cover a wide range of research areas. Novel analyses and often new diachronic data — also from less known and under-investigated languages — are provided to the debate on the principles, mechanisms, paths and models of language change, as well as the relationship between synchronic variation and diachrony. The volume is of interest to scholars of different persuasions working on all aspects of language change.

This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor. Dedicated to Tarald Taraldsen, the collection reflects the diverse energies that have pushed the cartographic program forward over the last decade. The first three papers deal with subject extraction, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. Luigi Rizzi presents arguments that subjects are 'criterial' and that subject extraction is highly restricted. Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche concur, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Adriana Belletti shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. The fourth paper, by Ian Roberts, analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The papers by M. Rita Manzini and Richard S. Kayne both present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The final three papers address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, Guglielmo Cinque's in a typological context and Anders Holmberg's within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final paper, by Edwin Williams, presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.

Offers a linguistic window into contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, looking at how they survive and interface with agricultural and industrial societies.

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.

The Indigenous Languages of the Americas is a comprehensive assessment of what is known about their history and classification. It identifies gaps in knowledge and resolves controversial issues while making new contributions of its own. The book deals with the major themes involving these languages: classification and history of the Indigenous languages of the Americas; issues involving language names; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified and spurious languages; hypotheses of distant linguistic relationships; linguistic areas; contact languages (pidgins, lingua francas, mixed languages); and loanwords and neologisms.

Is Africa a linguistic area (Heine & Leyew 2008)? The present volume consists of sixteen papers highlighting the linguistic geography of Africa, covering, in particular, southern Africa with its Khoisan languages. A wide range of phenomena are discussed to give an overview of the pattern of social, cultural, and linguistic interaction that characterizes Africa's linguistic geography. Most contributors to the volume discuss language contact and areal diffusion in Africa, although some demonstrate, with examples from non-African linguistic data, including Amazonian and European languages, how language contact may lead to structural convergence. Others investigate contact phenomena in social-cultural behavior. The volume makes a large contribution toward bringing generalized theory to data-oriented discussions. It is intended to stimulate further research on contact phenomena in Africa. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.

This book is a cross-linguistic examination of the different grammatical means languages employ to represent a general set of semantic relations between clauses. The investigations focus on ways of combining clauses other than through relative and complement clause constructions. These span a number of types of semantic linking. Three, for example, describe varieties of consequence - cause, result, and purpose - which may be illustrated in English by, respectively: Because John has been studying German for years, he speaks it well; John has been studying German for years, thus he speaks it well; and John has been studying German for years, in order that he should speak it well. Syntactic descriptions of languages provide a grammatical analysis of clause types. The chapters in this book add the further dimension of semantics, generally in the form of focal and supporting clauses, the former referring to the central activity or state of the biclausal linking; and the latter to the clause attached to it. The supporting clause may set out the temporal milieu for the focal clause or specify a condition or presupposition for it or a preliminary statement of it, as in Although John has been studying German for years (the supporting clause), he does not speak it well (the focal clause). Professor Dixon's extensive opening discussion is followed by fourteen case studies of languages ranging from Korean and Kham to Iquito and Ojibwe. The book's concluding synthesis is provided by Professor Aikhenvald.

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

Basic Linguistic Theory provides a fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In crystal-clear prose, R. M. W. Dixon describes how to go about doing linguistics. He show how grammatical structures and rules may be worked out on the basis of inductive generalisations, and explains the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can built up from observed utterances. He describes how the grammars and vocabulary of one language may be compared to others of the same or different families, explains the methods involved in cross-linguistic parametric analyses, and shows how to interpret the results. Volume 3 introduces and examines key grammatical topics, each from a cross-linguistic perspective. The subjects include number systems, negation, reflexives and reciprocals, passives, causatives, comparative constructions, and questions. The final chapter discusses the relation between linguistic explanation and the culture and world-view of the linguist and speakers of the language he or she is describing. The book ends with a guide to sources, a consideration of the number of languages in the world, a glossary, and indexes of authors, languages, and subjects covering all three volumes. Volume 1 addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages and includes chapters on analysis, typology, phonology, the lexicon, and field linguistics. Volume 2, like the present work, considers underlying principles of grammatical organization, and has chapters devoted to the word, nouns and verbs, adjectives, transitivity, copula constructions, pronouns and demonstratives, possession, relative clauses and complementation. Basic Linguistic Theory is the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's thinking about every aspect and manifestation of language. The volumes comprise a one-stop introduction for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, as well as for those in neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology.