A Grammar of Southern Pomo

A Grammar of Southern Pomo
Author: Neil Alexander Walker
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2020-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496217659

A title in the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A Grammar of Southern Pomo is the first comprehensive description of the Southern Pomo language, which lost its last fluent speaker in 2014. Southern Pomo is one of seven Pomoan languages once spoken in the vicinity of Clear Lake and the Russian River drainage of California. Prior to European contact, a third of all Pomoan peoples spoke Southern Pomo, and descendants of these speakers are scattered across several present-day reservations. These descendants have recently initiated efforts to revitalize the language. The unique culture of Southern Pomo speakers is embedded in the language in several ways. There are separate words for the many different species of oak trees and their different acorns, which were the people’s staple cuisine. The kinship system is unusually rich both semantically and morphologically, with terms marked for possession, generation, number, and case. Verbs similarly encode the ancient interactions of speakers with their land in more than a dozen directional suffixes indicating specific paths of movement. A Grammar of Southern Pomo sheds new light on a relatively unknown Indigenous California speech community. In many instances Neil Alexander Walker discusses phenomena that are rare or entirely unattested outside the language and challenges long-standing ideas about what human speech communities can create and pass on to children as well as the degree to which culture and place are inextricably woven into language.

Theoretical Aspects of Kashaya Phonology and Morphology

Theoretical Aspects of Kashaya Phonology and Morphology
Author: Eugene Buckley
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
Total Pages: 430
Release: 1994-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781881526025

This study discusses a wide range of phonological and morphological phenomena in Kashaya, a Pomoan language of northern California, and considers their implications for current theories of generative grammar. The volume raises issues in feature theory, presents a prosodic analysis, and discusses numerous morphological patterns. Eugene Buckley is assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Switch-reference and Universal Grammar

Switch-reference and Universal Grammar
Author: John Haiman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 359
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027228663

Canonical switch-reference is an inflectional category of the verb, which indicates whether or not its subject is identical with the subject of some other verb. Switch-reference may be analyzed from a structural or a functional point of view. Functionally, switch-reference is a device for referential tracking. Formally, switch-reference is almost always a verbal category, similar to the familiar category of verbal concord. In most languages switch-reference marking is indicated by a verbal affix, however in some languages it may be marked by an independent morpheme. The contributions to this volume are concerned with questions of form, function, and genesis of canonical switch-reference systems.

The Morphosyntax-phonology Connection

The Morphosyntax-phonology Connection
Author: Vera Gribanova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2017
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0190210303

The essays in this volume address a core question regarding the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do the grammatical components - syntax, morphology and phonology - have to each other? The book's fifteen essays make a powerful argument in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these various components, shedding light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between competing theories of morphosyntaxphonology interaction. These words incorporate insights from recent theoretical developments such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology, and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies, including field work and experimental and corpus-based quantitative work.

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America
Author: Carmen Dagostino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 922
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 3110712814

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.

A Grammar of Coastal Marind

A Grammar of Coastal Marind
Author: Bruno Olsson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110747065

This grammar provides the first modern, comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim, formerly expansionistic head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known Anim family, Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of unusual phenomena, including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb, verbal marking of focus (the 'Orientation' system), engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee, and a system of four genders realised by intricate agreement patterns. The structure of the language is examined in a detailed but accessible way, and its many complexities are brought to life by contextualised spontaneous data, drawn from a rich audio-visual corpus.

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 5 Volume Set

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 5 Volume Set
Author: Marc van Oostendorp
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 3183
Release: 2011-04-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 140518423X

Available online or as a five-volume print set, The Blackwell Companion to Phonology is a major reference work drawing together 124 new contributions from leading international scholars in the field. It will be indispensable to students and researchers in the field for years to come. Key Features: Full explorations of all the most important ideas and key developments in the field Documents major insights into human language gathered by phonologists in past decades; highlights interdisciplinary connections, such as the social and computational sciences; and examines statistical and experimental techniques Offers an overview of theoretical positions and ongoing debates within phonology at the beginning of the twenty-first century An extensive reference work based on the best and most recent scholarly research – ideal for advanced undergraduates through to faculty and researchers Publishing simultaneously in print and online; visit www.companiontophonology.com for full details Additional features of the online edition (ISBN: 978-1-4443-3526-2): Powerful searching, browsing, and cross-referencing capabilities, including Open URL linking, with all entries classified by key topic, subject, place, people, and period For those institutions already subscribing to Blackwell Reference Online, it offers fully integrated and searchable content with the comprehensive Handbooks in Linguistics series