The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea

The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea
Author: Alexandra Aikhenvald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 992
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019161534X

This book is the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea and is based entirely on the author's immersion fieldwork. Manambu belongs to the Ndu language family, and is spoken by about 2,500 people in five villages: Avatip, Yawabak, Malu, Apa:n, and Yambon (Yuanab) in East Sepik Province, Ambunti district. Manambu can be considered an endangered language. The Manambu language has many unusual properties. Every noun is considered masculine or feminine. Feminine gender - which is unmarked - is associated with small size and round shape, and masculine gender with elongated shape, large size, and importance. The Manambu culture is centered on ownership of personal names, and is similar to that of the Iatmul, described by Gregory Bateson. After an introductory account of the language and its speakers, Professor Aikhenvald devotes chapters to phonology, grammatical relations, word classes, gender, semantics, number, case, possession, derivation and compounding, pronouns, morphohology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clause structure, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, the lexicon, current directions of change, and genetic relationship to other languages. The description is presented in a clear style in a framework that will be comprehensible to all linguists and linguistically oriented anthropologists.

How Languages Work

How Languages Work
Author: Carol Genetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 677
Release: 2014-01-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107782570

A new and exciting introduction to linguistics, this textbook presents language in all its amazing complexity, while guiding students gently through the basics. Students emerge with an appreciation of the diversity of the world's languages, as well as a deeper understanding of the structure of human language, the ways it is used, and its broader social and cultural context. Chapters introducing the nuts and bolts of language study (phonology, syntax, meaning) are combined with those on the 'functions' of language (discourse, prosody, pragmatics, and language contact), helping students gain a better grasp of how language works in the real world. A rich set of language 'profiles' help students explore the world's linguistic diversity, identify similarities and differences between languages, and encourages them to apply concepts from earlier chapter material. A range of carefully designed pedagogical features encourage student engagement, adopting a step-by-step approach and using study questions and case studies.

Word Hunters

Word Hunters
Author: Hannah Sarvasy
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027264449

In Word Hunters, eleven distinguished linguists reflect on their career-spanning linguistic fieldwork. Over decades, each has repeatedly stood up to physical, intellectual, interpersonal, intercultural, and sometimes political challenges in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. These scholar-explorers have enlightened the world to the inner workings of languages in remote communities of Africa (West, East, and South), Amazonia, the Arctic, Australia, the Caucasus, Oceania, Siberia, and East Asia. They report some linguistic eureka moments, but also discuss cultural missteps, illness, and the other challenges of pursuing linguistic data in extreme circumstances. They write passionately about language death and their responsibilities to speech communities. The stories included here—the stuff of departmental and family legends—are published publicly for the first time.

The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking

The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking
Author: John Newman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2009-03-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027290156

This volume reviews a range of fascinating linguistic facts about ingestive predicates in the world’s languages. The highly multifaceted nature of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ events gives rise to interesting clausal properties of these predicates, such as the atypicality of transitive constructions involving ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in some languages. The two verbs are also sources for a large number of figurative uses across languages with meanings such as ‘destroy’, and ‘savour’, as well as participating in a great variety of idioms which can be quite opaque semantically. Grammaticalized extensions of these predicates also occur, such as the quantificational use of Hausa shaa 'drink’ meaning (roughly) ‘do X frequently, regularly’. Specialists discuss details of the use of these verbs in a variety of languages and language families: Australian languages, Papuan languages, Athapaskan languages, Japanese, Korean, Hausa, Amharic, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi.

Perception and Cognition in Language and Culture

Perception and Cognition in Language and Culture
Author: Alexandra Aikhenvald
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2013-01-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004233679

Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This can be done through lexical means, and through grammatical evidentials. The studies presented here focus on the experssions of perception and cognition in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America.

A grammar of Ulwa (Papua New Guinea)

A grammar of Ulwa (Papua New Guinea)
Author: Russell Barlow
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 795
Release: 2023-08-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961104158

This book is a grammatical description of Ulwa, a Papuan language spoken by about 600 people living in four villages in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Ulwa belongs to the Keram language family. This grammatical description is based on a corpus of recorded texts and elicited sentences that were collected during a total of about twelve months of research carried out between 2015 and 2018. The book aims to detail as many aspects of Ulwa grammar as possible, including matters of phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also contains a lexicon with over 1,400 entries and three fully glossed and translated texts. The book was written with a typologically oriented audience in mind, and should be of interest to Papuan specialists as well as to general linguists. It may be useful to those working on the history or classification of Papuan languages as well as those conducting typological research on any number of grammatical features.

A Dictionary of Kwoma

A Dictionary of Kwoma
Author: Ross Bowden
Publisher: Pacific Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Stu
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1997
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area
Author: Bill Palmer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1142
Release: 2017-12-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110567261

The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.