Bislama Reference Grammar

Bislama Reference Grammar
Author: Terry Crowley
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2004-05-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780824828806

Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar—an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow "simple" and even "deficient."

Bislama

Bislama
Author: Darrell T. Tryon
Publisher: Pacific Linguistics
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1987
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

A Dictionary of Nafsan, South Efate, Vanuatu

A Dictionary of Nafsan, South Efate, Vanuatu
Author: Nicholas Thieberger
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0824890515

This is a dictionary of Nafsan, the language spoken in Vanuatu in the south of Efate Island in the villages of Erakor, Pango, and Eratap. Nafsan is one of 130 distinct languages spoken in Vanuatu. Over several decades, linguist Nicholas Thieberger worked in close collaboration with the Erakor community to record this unique language and to refine its written presentation. The resulting publication offers insight into the diversity of meanings available to speakers of Nafsan, providing some 3,400 senses for Nafsan words and an English-Nafsan finderlist. In addition, the book gives an overview of the Nafsan sound system, provides a list of existing literature on the language dating back to early missionary translations, and includes maps of Efate locating nearly 200 place names. Readers will also find South Efate cultural knowledge embedded in the explanations of the Nafsan words and their usages. A welcome companion to Thieberger’s A Grammar of South Efate (2006), this book complements and significantly augments other multimedia resources made available online by the author.

Languages of Vanuatu

Languages of Vanuatu
Author: John Lynch
Publisher: Pacific Linguistics Research Dies Australian National Univ
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2001
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

A New Bislama Dictionary

A New Bislama Dictionary
Author: Terry Crowley
Publisher: [email protected]
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2003
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9789820203624

"A new Bislama dictionary is a substantially updated version of the first edition, which reflects the ever-changing vocabulary of Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu."--Back cover.

Beach-la-Mar to Bislama

Beach-la-Mar to Bislama
Author: Terry Crowley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1990
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

Bislama is the variety of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides). In this learned study, Crowley traces the history and development of Bislama from the 1840s to the present. Drawing on written records and other historical sources, he examines the language's labor history, and discusses the evolution of its grammatical construction.

A Grammar of South Efate

A Grammar of South Efate
Author: Nicholas Thieberger
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2006-07-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 082483061X

This book presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of PortVila. It is one of the first such grammars to take seriously the provision of primary data for the verification of claims made in the analysis. The research is set in the context of increasing attention being paid to the state of the world’s smaller languages and their prospects for being spoken into the future. In addition to providing an outline of the grammar of the language, the author describes the process of developing an archivable textual corpus that is used to make example sentences citable and playable, using software (Audiamus) developed in the course of the research. An included DVD provides a dictionary and finderlist, a set of interlinearized example texts and elicited sentences, and playable media versions of most example sentences and of the example texts.

Araki

Araki
Author: Alexandre François
Publisher: Pacific Linguistics
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2002
Genre: Araki language
ISBN:

The Lexicon in Focus

The Lexicon in Focus
Author: Leila Behrens
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2002
Genre: Computers
ISBN:

When something is in focus, light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed from different sides. Six views are represented in this volume: a cognitivist view of vagueness and lexicalization, a psycholinguistic view of lexical access in speech production, a patholinguistic view of lexical organization in schizophrenics, and three analyses from different points of view in computational linguistics, which deal with problems of the syntax-semantics interface, compositionality, and systematic polysemy. A metalinguistic initial contribution outlines the historical development of lexical semantics with its complementary, competing and converging strands. The introduction completes this integration of the different facets of research into a wider picture of lexicology.

Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity

Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity
Author: Hagen Peukert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017-05-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902726581X

This volume emphasizes the energetic nature of linguistic diversity and its consequences of how we think about language, how it affects the individual, education in school, and urban spaces across the globe. Hence, linguistic diversity reflects the constant state of rapid change prevalent in modern societies bearing opportunities as well as challenges. It is the prime objective of this selection of contributions to give a differentiated picture of the chances of linguistic diversity. Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity pays tribute to more recent developments in the study of language, applied linguistics, and education sciences. Contributions in this volume discuss how the concept of language is contextualized in a world of polylanguaging, investigate latent factors of influence, multilingual individuals, multilingual proficiency, multilingual practices and development, multilingual communication as well as teaching practices and whether they foster or hamper multilingual development.