By John Colarusso
February 29, 2016
Perhaps more than any other group of languages those of the Caucasus are famous for their enormous and difficult consonantal systems. It is by no means exceptional for one of these languages to have as many as 50 consonants, and of these languages those from the Northwest Caucasus have the largest ...
By Elaine Slosburg Andersen
January 29, 2016
In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the ...
By Helen MacMillan Buckhurst
January 20, 2016
The first available Elementary Grammar of Old Icelandic in the English language, this book is primarily intended for the beginner. To this end, the greater part of the space is devoted to a detailed treatment of the inflexions and of such points of syntax as are likely to cause difficulties....
By Russell S Tomlin
January 20, 2016
This book examines the frequencies of the six possible basic word (or constituent) orders (SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS) provides a typologically grounded explanation for those frequencies in terms of three independent, functional principles of linguistic organization. From a database of nearly ...
Edited
By Jyotsna Vaid
January 20, 2016
For decades, bilingualism has resisted definition. If bilingualism is defined as habitual, fluent, correct and accent-free use of two languages, few individuals would qualify as bilinguals. A more viable approach may be to concede that ‘bilingual’ can be seen instead as a range of points on a ...
By Christopher J. Hall
January 20, 2016
The central concern of this book is the explanation of linguistic form. It examines in detail certain cross-linguistic patterns in morphological systems, providing unified explanations of the observation that suffixes predominate over prefixes and the correlation between affix position and ...
By John C. Moore
January 20, 2016
This book discusses a class of Reduced Constructions which exhibit both mono- and bi-clausal characteristics. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the most salient mono-clausal characteristic is the possibility of clitic climbing, i.e. the possibility of an object clitic attaching to a ...
Edited
By John M. Kirk, Stewart Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson
January 20, 2016
The publication in the past ten years of linguistic atlases of England and Scotland has not only advanced our knowledge of the lexical and morphological variety inherent in the English language, but has made it possible to establish a number of methodological principles for the study of language ...
By Louanna Furbee-Losee
January 20, 2016
Definitions of language cluster around two non-contradictory views: one that language is a shared code, a social entity, and the other that language is the knowledge that enables a native speaker to produce and understand speech. In examining the language and culture of the Tojolabal (Mayan) ...
By Daniel L Finer
January 20, 2016
This book studies the syntax of switch-reference and its implications for the theory of grammar. Switch-reference, found in many genetically and geographically diverse languages, is a phenomenon whereby referential identity between subjects of hierarchically adjacent clauses is encoded by the ...
By Frits Stuurman
January 20, 2016
This book focuses on two major traditions in the study of Modern English grammar: ‘old grammar’ in the Great Tradition of Sweet, Poutsma, Kruisinga, Curme, Jespersen and Quirk; and ‘new grammar’ in applications to Modern English of Chomskyan generative syntax. The purpose is to promote the study of...
By William Walker Chambers, John Ritchie Wilkie
December 18, 2015
This simple introduction to the history of the German language seeks to provide students who have some knowledge of modern German, but no knowledge either of its development or of linguistic theories, with a short account of the essential factors – chronological, geographical and linguistic – and ...