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This book is a description of Kilmeri, a language of Papua New Guinea, based on the author's fieldwork. The volume is dedicated to the detailed description of form and meaning and their interface, which is supported through extensive illustration by examples. The narrative structure of entire texts is accessible via a small collection of fully glossed personal and traditional stories included in the Online Supplement. The typological evaluation of selected properties of Kilmeri rounds out the description of the language.
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.
This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveals that speakers make use of two contrasting modes for structuring their discourses, both of which are needed for successful communication: one is sentence grammar, which has a propositional format and analytic organization; the other is interactive grammar, which has a holophrastic organization and a focus on social communication. While the argument structure of sentence grammar is shaped by the propositional format of sentences, that of interactive grammar is shaped by the indexical nature of the situation of discourse. This distinction shows interesting correlations both with findings from neurolinguistic studies on differential activity in the two hemispheres of the human brain, and with observations from social psychology on the differences between systems of reasoning and judgment.
The result of over five years of close collaboration among an international group of leading typologists within the EUROTYP program, this volume is about the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase. Particular attention is being paid to nominal inflectional categories and inflectional systems and to the syntax of determination, modification, and conjunction. Its areal focus, like that of other EUROTYP volumes, is on the languages of Europe; but in order to appreciate what is peculiarly European about their noun phrases, a more comprehensive and genuinely typological view is being taken at the full range of cross-linguistic variation within this structural domain. There has been no shortage lately of contributions to the theory of noun phrase structure; the present volume is, however, unique in the extent to which its theorizing is empirically grounded.
This volume contains a wealth of information on the word accentual (metrical, stress) phenomena that we encounter in natural languages. Two types of information will be supplied: language profiles in 'tabular form' and survey articles. Of the total of 10 chapters in Part I, 3 are general in nature, while the other 7 describe and analyze word accentual systems in all continents. The volume's point of departure is a database called StressTyp. StressTyp developed into a database on word prosodic systems of the languages of the world. The over 500 languages, representing a wide geographical distribution, taken from the StressTyp database will be represented in this volume. For all these languages, information regarding identity, sources and stress location(s) will be included, accompanied by some examples in nearly all cases. These language data packages will be organized by language family. This information constitutes Part II of the volume.
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.
A thorough rewriting to reflect advances in typology and universals in the past decade.
Relative clauses play a hugely important role in analysing the structure of sentences. This book provides the first evidence that a unified analysis of the different types of relative clauses is possible - a step forward in our understanding. Using careful analyses of a wide range of languages, Cinque argues that the relative clause types can all be derived from a single, double-headed, structure. He also presents evidence that restrictive, maximalizing, ('integrated') non-restrictive, kind-defining, infinitival and participial RCs merge at different heights of the nominal extended projection. This book provides an elegant generalization about the structure of all relatives. Theoretically profound and empirically rich, it promises to radically alter the way we think about this subject for years to come.
This book presents a new cross-linguistic analysis of gender and its effects on morphosyntax. It addresses questions including the syntactic location of gender features; the role of natural gender; and the relationship between syntactic gender features and the morphological realization of gender. Ruth Kramer argues that gender features are syntactically located on the n head ('little n'), which serves to nominalize category-neutral roots. Those gender features are either interpretable, as in the case of natural gender, or uninterpretable, like the gender of an inanimate noun in Spanish. Adopting Distributed Morphology, the book lays out how the gender features on n map onto the gender features relevant for morphological exponence. The analysis is supported by an in-depth case study of Amharic, which poses challenges for previous gender analyses and provides clear support for gender on n. The proposals generate a typology of two- and three-gender systems, with the various types illustrated using data from a genetically diverse set of languages. Finally, further evidence for gender being on n is provided from case studies of Somali and Romanian, as well as from the relationship between gender and other linguistic phenomena including derived nouns and declension class. Overall, the book provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the morphosyntax of gender.