The Chimariko language, now extinct, was spoken in Trinity County, California. This reference grammar, based on data collected by Harrington in the 1920's, represents the most comprehensive description of the language. Written from a functional-typological perspective this work also examines language contact in Northern California showing that grammatical traits are often shared among genetically unrelated languages in geographically contiguous areas.

This volume explores the grammatical properties of body-part expressions across a range of languages and language families in the Americas, including Arawakan, Eastern Tukano, Mataguayan, Panoan, and Takanan. Expressions denoting parts of the body often exhibit specific grammatical properties that are intrinsically related to their semantics, and frequently appear in dedicated constructions, many of which are found exclusively in association with these expressions. Following a detailed introduction and discussion of the foundations of body-part grammar, the chapters in the first part of the book investigate categorialization, lexicalization, and the semantic processes associated with body-part expressions. In the second part of the book, contributors investigate specific grammatical properties of body-part expressions, such as inalienability, incorporation, possessive constructions, prefixation, topicality, and word-formation strategies. The volume draws on data from lesser-known languages that are often under-represented in comparative work, and makes a significant contribution not only to the linguistics of the Americas and the typology of body-part expressions, but also to typological studies more broadly, and to historical, comparative, and anthropological linguistics.

This book presents a new perspective on ways we encounter the world with our languages. There are two kinds of languages. Some direct speakers to encounter the world as made up of things. Others direct speakers to encounter the world as the flow of all with no idea of change, for there is no thing to change, only differing descriptions of the flow. The essays by Richard L. Epstein set out this division of languages and explore its significance for linguistics, metaphysics, thought, meaning, logic, and ethics. The other essays, by Dorothy Lee, Benjamin Lee Whorf, M. Dale Kinkade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benson Mates, extend, or contradict, or support those ideas, leading to a large view of how we talk and understand, and how that affects how we live.

Published through theRecovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A Native American language formerly spoken in hundreds of communities in the interior of California, Patwin (also known as Wintun Tʼewe) is now spoken by a small but growing number of language revitalizationists and their students. A Grammar of Patwin brings together two hundred years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings, and manuscripts from archives across the United States and synthesizes this scattered collection into the first published description of the Patwin language. This book shines a light on the knowledge of past speakers and researchers with a clear and well-organized description supported by ample archival evidence. Lewis C. Lawyer addresses the full range of grammatical structure with chapters on phonetics, phonology, nominals, nominal modifiers, spatial terms, verbs, and clauses. At every level of grammatical structure there is notable variation between dialects, and this variation is painstakingly described. An introductory chapter situates the language geographically and historically and also gives a detailed account of previous work on the language and of the archival materials on which the study is based. Throughout the process of writing this book, Lawyer remained in contact with Patwin communities and individuals, who helped to ensure that the content is appropriate from a cultural perspective.

An examination of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between grammar and thought.