American Indian Linguistics and Ethnography in Honor of Laurence C. Thompson PDF Download

Author: Anthony Mattina
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Author: Lyle Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195349830
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies. There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition.

Author: Anthony Mattina
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indians of North America
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Author: Carmen Dagostino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110712741
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 998

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Book Description
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.

Author: Dell Hymes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135745668
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This collection of work addresses the contribution that ethnography and linguistics make to education, and the contribution that research in education makes to anthropology and linguistics.; The first section of the book pinpoints characteristics of anthropology that most make a difference to research in education. The second section describes the perspective that is needed if the study of language is to contribute adequately to problems of education and inequality. Finally, the third section takes up discoveries about narrative, which show that young people's narratives may have a depth of form and skill that has gone largely unrecognized.

Author: Marianne Mithun
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521298759
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Author: Jay Miller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803278667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.

Author: Annie York
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774841885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Living on the banks of the turbulent Fraser River, the Nlaka'pamux people of Spuzzum have a long history of contact with non-aboriginal peoples. They watched as Hudson's Bay Company employees hacked a path through the mountains for the fur brigades, and over time they found themselves in the path of the Cariboo road, the CPR, and virtually every commercial and province-building initiative undertaken in the region over the past two centuries. Juxtaposing historical narratives and cultural interpretation from the community of Spuzzum with archival information, this book explores the history of Spuzzum in the light of concepts central to the Nlaka'pamux definition of family, political authority, land, and cosmos.

Author: Bernhard Hurch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110911469
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
For several reasons, mostly inherent to the different developments of generative grammar, an increasing number of publications have dealt with reduplication in the past 20 years. Reduplication lends itself perfectly as a test field for theories that opt for a non-segmental organization of phonology and morphology. As it happens frequently, then, the discussion centers around a rather small set of data for which alternative analysis are offered, and which themselves are intended to contribute to the foundation of new theoretical developments. The present volume (which goes back to a conference on reduplication at the University of Graz, Austria) offers a broader approach to reduplication not only from different theoretical viewpoints, but especially for its phenomenology. Across theories a number of highly qualified authors deal with formal and functional perspectives, with typological properties, with semantics, comparative issues, the role of reduplication in language acquisition, the acquisition of reduplicative systems, sign languages, creoles and pidgins, general grammatical and cognitive principles; the picture is completed by a series of language or language-family specific studies as on Uto-Aztecan, Salish, Tupi-Guarani, Moroccan and Cairene Arabic, various African languages, Chinese, Turkish, Indo-European, languages from India, etc. The overall scope of the conference was to contribute to a new level of discussion of the phenomenon, across theories and across specializations and interests. Update on Contributor's addresses (PDF)

Author: Richard W. Bailey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199921466
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
When did English become American? What distinctive qualities made it American? What role have America's democratizing impulses, and its vibrantly heterogeneous speakers, played in shaping our language and separating it from the mother tongue? A wide-ranging account of American English, Richard Bailey's Speaking American investigates the history and continuing evolution of our language from the sixteenth century to the present. The book is organized in half-century segments around influential centers: Chesapeake Bay (1600-1650), Boston (1650-1700), Charleston (1700-1750), Philadelphia (1750-1800), New Orleans (1800-1850), New York (1850-1900), Chicago (1900-1950), Los Angeles (1950-2000), and Cyberspace (2000-present). Each of these places has added new words, new inflections, new ways of speaking to the elusive, boisterous, ever-changing linguistic experiment that is American English. Freed from British constraints of unity and propriety, swept up in rapid social change, restless movement, and a thirst for innovation, Americans have always been eager to invent new words, from earthy frontier expressions like "catawampously" (vigorously) and "bung-nipper" (pickpocket), to West African words introduced by slaves such as "goober" (peanut) and "gumbo" (okra), to urban slang such as "tagging" (spraying graffiti) and "crew" (gang). Throughout, Bailey focuses on how people speak and how speakers change the language. The book is filled with transcripts of arresting voices, precisely situated in time and space: two justices of the peace sitting in a pumpkin patch trying an Indian for theft; a crowd of Africans lounging on the waterfront in Philadelphia discussing the newly independent nation in their home languages; a Chicago gangster complaining that his pocket had been picked; Valley Girls chattering; Crips and Bloods negotiating their gang identities in LA; and more. Speaking American explores--and celebrates--the endless variety and remarkable inventiveness that have always been at the heart of American English.