Annotation. ContentsThe Editors: Preface List of Publications by Frederik Kortlandt Willem ADELAAR: Towards a Typological Profile of the Andean Languages Elisabeth DE BOER: The Origin of Alternations in Initial Pitch in ihe Verbal Paradigms of the Central Japanese (Kyôto Type) Accent SystemsV. A. CHIRIKBA: Armenians and their Dialects in AbkhaziaKatia CHIRKOVA: On the Position of Báimã within Tibetan: A Look from Basic VocabularyKaren STEFFEN CHUNG: Living (Happily) with Contradiction George van DRIEM: The Language Organism: Parasite or Mutualist?Roger FINCH: Mongolian /-gar/ and Japanese /-gar-/Stefan GEORG: Yeniseic Languages and the Siberian Linguistic AreaEkaterina GRUZDEVA: How to Orient Oneself on Sakhalin: A Guide to Nivkh Locational TermsC. HOEDE: Knowledge Graph Analysis of Particles in JapaneseHenning KLÖTER: Facts and Fantasy about Favorlang: Early European Encounters with Taiwan¿s LanguagesMaarten KOSSMANN: Three Irregular Berber Verbs: Èat¿, D̀rink¿, B̀e Cooked, Ripen¿Riikka LÄNSISALMI: Teaching Personal Reference in JapaneseElena MASLOVA: Dual Nominalisation in Yukaghir: Structural Ambiguity as Semantic DualityRoy Andrew MILLER: The Altaic Aorist in *-Ra in Old KoreanMarc Hideo MIYAKE: Avoiding Abba: Old Chinese Syllabic HarmonyMaarten MOUS: Voice in Tunen: The So-Called Passive Prefix Bé-Irina NIKOLAEVA: Chuvan and Omok Languages?Martine ROBBEETS: If Japanese is Altaic, How can it be so Simple?Elena SKRIBNIK: Buryat Evaluative ConstructionsHarry STROOMER: Three Tashelhiyt Berber Texts from the Arsène Roux ArchivesArie VERHAGEN: Syntax, Recursion, Productivity ¿ A Usage-Based Perspective on the Evolution of GrammarJeroen WIEDENHOF: Language, Brains and the Syntactic Revolution.

This volume represents an overview of current research on Slavic linguistics in Europe and North America based on selected papers presented during the 6th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (September 1-3, 2011, Aix-en-Provence, France). It includes topics across a range of linguistic fields (morphosyntax, syntax, and semantics) and discussions on specific aspects of Slavic languages within a typological perspective. All the papers illustrate a range of approaches, and each paper presents rigorous analysis of a set of Slavic data within the context of various models and aspects of language. While the main focus of the collection is impersonal constructions in Slavic languages, the book also includes morphological topics, such as reflexives, antipassive and evidential markers, syntactical relations with zero sign, auxiliary verbs and subordinate clauses, and semantics of nouns, adverbs and adjectives. The volume will be of interest to all scholars studying Slavic languages as well as those interested in general linguistics and linguistic typology.

This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.

This collection provides a comprehensive overview of Russian language research in Canada and Russia, with a focus on elements of structure, as well as on language dynamics and change.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2016 initiates a new series of collective volumes on formal Slavic linguistics. It presents a selection of high quality papers authored by young and senior linguists from around the world and contains both empirically oriented work, underpinned by up-to-date experimental methods, as well as more theoretically grounded contributions. The volume covers all major linguistic areas, including morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and their mutual interfaces. The particular topics discussed include argument structure, word order, case, agreement, tense, aspect, clausal left periphery, or segmental phonology. The topical breadth and analytical depth of the contributions reflect the vitality of the field of formal Slavic linguistics and prove its relevance to the global linguistic endeavour. Early versions of the papers included in this volume were presented at the conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12 or at the satellite Workshop on Formal and Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics, which were held on December 7-10, 2016 in Berlin.

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.