Research in Afroasiatic Grammar PDF Download

Author: Jacqueline Lecarme
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237095
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This volume presents a selection of papers from the 3rd Conference on Afroasiatic Languages, held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 1996. The languages discussed include (varieties of) Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Chaha, Wolof, and Old Egyptian.

Author: Jacqueline Lecarme
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027247536
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
This volume contains 22 of the papers presented at the 5th Conference on Afroasiatic Languages (CAL 5) held at Université Paris VII in June 2000. The authors report their latest research on the syntax, morphology, and phonology of quite a number of languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya, Coptic Egyptian, Berber, Hausa, Beja, Somali, Gamo). The articles discuss new solutions to familiar questions such as the free state/construct state alternation of nouns, the Semitic template system, and the morphosyntax of nominal and verbal plurality. Ten of the papers center on morphology, especially the relation of phonology to syntax and morphology; others address questions at the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface; two papers also offer comparative and historical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the papers provide an accurate picture of the state of current research in Afroasiatic linguistics, containing important new data and new analyses. Given its coverage, the book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Afroasiatic languages and theoretical linguistics.

Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108977852
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 707

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Book Description
Afroasiatic languages are spoken by some 300 million people in Northern, Central and Eastern Africa and the Middle East. This book is the first typological study of these languages, which are comprised of around 375 living and extinct varieties. They are an important object of study because of their typological diversity in the areas of phonology (some have tone; others do not), morphology (some have extensive inflectional systems; others do not), position of the verb in the clause (some are verb-initial, some are verb-medial, and some are verb-final) and in the semantic functions they encode. This book documents this typological diversity and the typological similarities across the languages and includes information on endangered and little-known languages. Requiring no previous knowledge of the specific language families, it will be welcomed by linguists interested in linguistic theory, typology, historical linguistics and endangered languages, as well as scholars of Africa and the Middle East.

Author: Charles G. Häberl
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443811432
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Robert Hetzron first organized the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1973 and passed away only six months after it had completed a quarter century of annual meetings. He would undoubtedly have been pleased to know that NACAL is still going strong, and that ten years after his passing it attracted no fewer than thirty-six scholars from the United States, Canada, and eight other countries, who presented on topics near and dear to his heart such as phonology, morphology, syntax, language contact, classification, subgrouping, and the history of scholarship, in languages such as Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hebrew, Omotic, and others, as well as the groups to which they pertain. Since he established it, NACAL has served a unique role among the meetings of learned societies in North America. Only a handful of organizations worldwide hold annual meetings dedicated to Afroasiatic linguistics, and NACAL is one of a very small number of venues where linguists from all sub-disciplines and schools of thought meet to share their research. NACAL is also an academic nexus, a unique node at which graduate students at the beginning of their careers rub shoulders with the native speakers of the languages which they study and with the titans of their fields, men and women of an almost legendary stature such as Hetzron himself. This volume contains sixteen contributions from these scholars, on a broad cross-section of topics within the field of Afroasiatic linguistics.

Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110195934
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Contains a collection of articles on focus in the Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic language groups. This book investigates focus-related phenomena from different theoretical and methodological perspectives: the interaction of focus and prosody, the effect of focus on word order, the inventory of focus-marking devices, and others.

Author: María Victoria Almansa-Villatoro
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646022319
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
By challenging assumptions regarding the proximity between Egyptian and Semitic Languages, Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic provides a fresh approach to the relationships and similarities between Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, and Afroasiatic languages. This in-depth analysis includes a re-examination of the methodologies deployed in historical linguistics and comparative grammar, a morphological study of Ancient Egyptian, and critical comparisons between Ancient Egyptian and Semitic, as well as careful considerations of environmental factors and archaeological evidence. These contributions offer a reassessment of the Afroasiatic phylum, which is based on the relations between Ancient Egyptian and the other Afroasiatic branches. This volume illustrates the advantages of viewing Ancient Egyptian in its African context. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this collection include Shiferaw Assefa, Michael Avina, Vit Bubenik, Leo Depuydt, Christopher Ehret, Zygmunt Frajzyngier, J. Lafayette Gaston, Tiffany Gleason, John Huehnergard, Andrew Kitchen, Elsa Oréal, Chelsea Sanker, Lameen Souag, Andréas Stauder, Deven N. Vyas, Aren Wilson-Wright, and Jean Winand.

Author: Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027296790
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Asymmetry in Grammar: Morphology, Phonology and Acquisition presents evidence that asymmetry, as a property of linguistic relations, is salient in grammar. The papers in morphology bring further evidence for the centrality of asymmetry in word-structure. It is shown that asymmetry is part of the internal structure of functional constructs such as determiners and complementizers, as it is the case for lexical constructs. Further evidence is presented for the asymmetry of prefixes in verb structure. A typology of formal objects based on the distinction between maximal and minimal categories is formulated. It is proposed that Formal Complexity drives the change from synthetic to analytic expressions. The papers in phonology point to the fact that asymmetry is part of that linguistic dimension in terms of processes that eliminates symmetric relations, in terms of head-dependency relations, in terms of relative scope of the distinctive features in any inventory, in terms of universal principles in combination with certain language specific choices. Moreover, the papers on acquisition bring to fore experimental data that point to the same direction. The asymmetry of grammatical relations provides the form of the initial state of language that enables the child to cope with the poverty of the stimulus. The collection includes papers in morphology by Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Angela Ralli, Réjean Canac-Marquis, Abdelkader Fassi Fehri, papers in phonology by Eric Raimy, Harry van der Hulst and Nancy Ritter, Glyne Piggott, Charles Reiss, Elan Dresher, and papers in acquisition from Maria Louisa Rivero and Magdalena Goledzinowska, and David Lebeaux.

Author: Ruth Elizabeth King
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book is a detailed study of French-English linguistic borrowing in Prince Edward Island, Canada which argues for the centrality of lexical innovation to grammatical change. Chapters 1–4 present the theoretical and methodological perspectives adopted along with the sociolinguistic history of Acadian French. Chapter 5 outlines the basic features of Acadian French morphosyntax. Chapter 6 provides an overview of the linguistic consequences of language contact in Prince Edward Island. Chapters 7–9 consider three particular cases of grammatical borrowing: the borrowing of the English adverb back and the semantic and syntactic reanalysis it has undergone, the borrowing of a wide range of English prepositions, resulting in dramatic changes in the syntactic behaviour of French prepositions, and the borrowing of English wh-ever words, resulting in the emergence of a new type of free relative. Chapter 10 argues for a theory of grammar contact by which contact-induced grammatical change is mediated by the lexicon.

Author: Ralph W. Fasold
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027235465
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The study of language variation in social context continues to hold the attention of a large number of linguists. This research is promoted by the annual colloquia on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English' (NWAVE). This volume is a selection of revised papers from the NWAVE XI, held at Georgetown University. It deals with a number of items, some of which have often been discussed, others that have been less emphasized. The first group of articles in the volume center on a frequent theme: speech communities as the essential setting for understanding variation in language. Earlier work in linguistic variation dealt for the most part with phonological variation and change. Syntactic and morphological change and variation in syntax are also discussed. A selection on the role of variation in understanding first language acquisition comprises three papers. Articles in the last section of the volume concern theoretical controversy and methodological advances.

Author: Rainer Vossen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191007374
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1056

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Africa is believed to host at least one third of the world's languages, usually classified into four phyla - Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan - which are then subdivided into further families and subgroupings. This volume explores all aspects of research in the field, beginning with chapters that cover the major domains of grammar and comparative approaches. Later parts provide overviews of the phyla and subfamilies, alongside grammatical sketches of eighteen representative African languages of diverse genetic affiliation. The volume additionally explores multiple other topics relating to African languages and linguistics, with a particular focus on extralinguistic issues: language, cognition, and culture, including colour terminology and conversation analysis; language and society, including language contact and endangerment; language and history; and language and orature. This wide-ranging handbook will be a valuable reference for scholars and students in all areas of African linguistics and anthropology, and for anyone interested in descriptive, documentary, typological, and comparative linguistics.