The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

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.

This book offers the first detailed grammatical description of Paunaka, an Arawakan language spoken (in 2023) by eight people in the Chiquitania region in the lowlands of Eastern Bolivia. The grammar builds on material collected during several fieldwork trips between 2009 and 2020 by the team of the Paunaka Documentation Project, which was funded by the ELDP from 2011–2013. This material includes roughly 120 hours of audio and video recordings, which have been archived at ELAR. In 2022, the dissertation on which this book is based received the annual Research Award at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. The grammar provides a description of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Paunaka, including numerous comparative remarks to closely related languages. It includes over 1500 examples, most of them accompanied by a brief description of their original linguistic or extralinguistic context.

This handbook provides the first broadly comprehensive, typologically-informed descriptive overview of the languages of Greater Amazonia. Organized by genealogical units, the chapters provide empirically rich descriptions of the phonology and grammar of all Amazonian families and isolates for which data and descriptions exist. Volume 1 focuses on the many isolates of the region – those languages for which no extant sisters can be identified.

This comparative volume explores how speakers across languages use the concept of the ‘face’ to describe emotions, human interaction, and directions. The analyses discuss cognitive processes involved in extending human body parts to concepts beyond the body.

This book covers the ethnobiology and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Solega people of southern India. Solega TEK is shown to be a complex, inter-related network of detailed observations of natural phenomena, well-reasoned and often highly accurate theorizing, as well as a belief system, derived from cultural norms, regarding the relationships between humans and other species on the one hand, and between non-human species on the other. As language-based studies are strongly biased toward investigations of ethno-taxonomy and nomenclature, the importance of studying TEK in its proper context is discussed as making context and encyclopedic knowledge the objects of study are essential for a proper understanding of TEK.

This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. -- Back cover.