Author: Marianne Mithun Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521298759 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 800
Book Description
This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.
Author: Thomas Sebeok Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1475715595 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 630
Book Description
Thirteen of the chapters that comprise the contents of this first volume of Native Languages of the A mericas were originally commissioned by the undersigned in his capacity as Editor of the fourteen volume series (1963-1976), Current Trends in Linguistics. All appeared, in 1973, under Part Three of the quadripartite Vol. 10, subtitled Linguistics in North America. Two additional chaplers are being held over for the volume to follow shortly, devoted to Central and South American lan guages and linguistics, where they more appropriately belong. A fourteenth chapter, on the" Historiography of native North A merican linguistics," was written similarly by invitation, for Vol. 13, subtitled Historiography of Linguistics, published in 1975. Both Volumes 10 and 13 were jointly financed by the United States National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, with an enhancing contribution to the former by the Canada Council. The generosity of these funding agencies was, of course, previously acknowledged in my respective Editor's Introductions to the two books mentioned, but cannot be repeated too often: without their welcome and timely assistance, the global project could scarcely have been realized on so comprehensive a scale. The Current Trends in Linguistics series was a long-term venture of Mouton Publishers, of The Hague, under the imaginative in-house direction of Peter de Rid der. Various spin-offs were foreseen, and some of them happily realized.
Author: Lyle Campbell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195349830 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 527
Book Description
Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies. There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition.
Author: Raymond Hickey Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316839451 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 1687
Book Description
Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wealth of case studies from all major regions of the world and, with chapters from scholars with a broad spectrum of language expertise, it offers insights into the mechanisms of external language change. With no book currently like this on the market, The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics will be welcomed by students and scholars working on the history of language families, documentation and classification, and will help readers to understand the key area of areal linguistics within a broader linguistic context.
Author: Carmen Dagostino Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110600927 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 769
Book Description
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.
Author: Sarah Rivett Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190492562 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 397
Book Description
In 1664, French Jesuit Louis Nicolas arrived in Quebec. Upon first hearing Ojibwe, Nicolas observed that he had encountered the most barbaric language in the world--but after listening to and studying approximately fifteen Algonquian languages over a ten-year period, he wrote that he had "discovered all of the secrets of the most beautiful languages in the universe." Unscripted America is a study of how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Unscripted America contends that what scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words. By examining the foundation of the literary nation through language, writing, and literacy, Unscripted America revisits common conceptions regarding "early america" and its origins to demonstrate how the understanding of America developed out of a steadfast connection to American Indians, both past and present.
Author: Janine Scancarelli Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803242357 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 584
Book Description
"Contributing linguists draw on their latest fieldwork and research, starting with a background chapter on the history of research on the Native languages of the Southeast. Eight chapters each provide an overview and grammatical sketch of a language, basing discussion on a narrative text presented at the beginning of the chapter. Special emphasis is given to both the fundamental grammatical characteristics of the language - its phonology, morphology, syntax, and various discourse features - and those sociolinguistic and cultural factors that affect its structure and use. Two additional chapters explore the various Muskogean languages (Creek, Alabama, Choctaw, Chickasaw), the only language family confined entirely to the Southeast.".
Author: Charles L. Cutler Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 9780618065103 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
An examination of the cultural impact of Native Americans on the English language studies seventy words borrowed from Native American languages, revealing what each word means, the role it played in traditional Indian societies, and its role in America today.
Author: Marianne Mithun
Author: Thomas Sebeok
Author: Lyle Campbell
Author: Michael Dürr
Author: Raymond Hickey
Author: Carmen Dagostino
Author: Sarah Rivett
Author: Carmen Dagostino
Author: Janine Scancarelli
Author: Charles L. Cutler