Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages
Author: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027287228

This advanced historical linguistics course book deals with the historical and comparative study of African languages. The first part functions as an elementary introduction to the comparative method, involving the establishment of lexical and grammatical cognates, the reconstruction of their historical development, techniques for the subclassification of related languages, and the use of language-internal evidence, more specifically the application of internal reconstruction. Part II addresses language contact phenomena and the status of language in a wider, cultural-historical and ecological context. Part III deals with the relationship between comparative linguistics and other disciplines. In this rich course book, the author presents valuable views on a number of issues in the comparative study of African languages, more specifically concerning genetic diversity on the African continent, the status of pidginised and creolised languages, language mixing, and grammaticalisation.

Number – Constructions and Semantics

Number – Constructions and Semantics
Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027270635

This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

A Grammar of Luwo

A Grammar of Luwo
Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269378

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

The Oxford Handbook of Inflection

The Oxford Handbook of Inflection
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 783
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191664944

This is the latest addition to a group of handbooks covering the field of morphology, alongside The Oxford Handbook of Case (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (2014). It provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of work on inflection - the expression of grammatical information through changes in word forms. The volume's 24 chapters are written by experts in the field from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, with examples drawn from a wide range of languages. The first part of the handbook covers the fundamental building blocks of inflectional form and content: morphemes, features, and means of exponence. Part 2 focuses on what is arguably the most characteristic property of inflectional systems, paradigmatic structure, and the non-trivial nature of the mapping between function and form. The third part deals with change and variation over time, and the fourth part covers computational issues from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Part 5 addresses psycholinguistic questions relating to language acquisition and neurocognitive disorders. The final part is devoted to sketches of individual inflectional systems, illustrating a range of typological possibilities across a genetically diverse set of languages from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Australia, Europe, and South America.

Theory and description in African Linguistics

Theory and description in African Linguistics
Author: Emily Clem
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 788
Release: 2019
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102058

The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL.

Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3

Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3
Author: R. M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2012-05-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199571090

R.M.W. Dixon provides a comprehensive guide to the nature of human languages and their description and analysis. The books are a one-stop text for undergraduate and graduate students, the outcome of a lifetime's immersion in every aspect of language.

A Grammar of Lopit

A Grammar of Lopit
Author: Jonathan Moodie
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2020-09-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004430679

In A Grammar of Lopit, Jonathan Moodie and Rosey Billington provide the first detailed description of Lopit, an Eastern Nilotic language traditionally spoken in the Lopit Mountains in South Sudan. Drawing on extensive primary data, the authors describe the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the Lopit language. Their analyses offer new insights into phenomena characteristic of Nilo-Saharan languages, such as ‘Advanced Tongue Root’ vowel distinctions, tripartitite number marking, and marked-nominative case systems, and they uncover patterns which are previously unattested within the Eastern Nilotic family, such as a three-way contrast in aspect, number marking with the ‘greater singular’, and two kinds of inclusory constructions. This book offers a significant contribution to the descriptive and typological literature on African languages.

Secret Manipulations

Secret Manipulations
Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2011-09-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019020821X

Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. Focusing on a specific form of language change-deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers-it provides a new approach to local language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge. Anne Storch concentrates on case studies from Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, the African diaspora, and 16th century Europe. In these cases, language manipulation varies with social and cultural contexts, and is almost always done in secret. At the same time, this manipulation can be an act of subversion and an expression of power, and it is often central to the construction of social norms, as it constructs oppositions and gives marginalized people a chance to articulate themselves. This volume illustrates how manipulated languages are constructed, how they are used, and how they wield power.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology
Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019165177X

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009) Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters aim to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. The book also surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics.