Download Free A Grammar Of Kam Revealed In Its Narrative Discourse Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Grammar Of Kam Revealed In Its Narrative Discourse and write the review.

The Kam language of China possesses fifteen tones – more than any other language. Yet it has long been neglected as an area of research, especially from the perspective of discourse analysis. This study initiates the exploration of the interface between grammar and discourse by examining various aspects of Kam narrative discourse, and using a functional approach to reveal its structural properties. It also introduces the mechanism for phonological and syntactic variations, as well as classifier variants and sentence-final particles (SFPs) in discourse and word order variations. Finally, it discusses the influence of social setting on narrative structure and offers the most up-to-date ethnological and social information about the community.
The Routledge Language Family Series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, or those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development. With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area. It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time. Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists. ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University. JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars. YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.
This book outlines a system of phonological features that is minimally sufficient to distinguish all consonants and vowels in the languages of the world. The extensive evidence is drawn from datasets with a combined total of about 1000 sound inventories. The interpretation of phonetic transcriptions from different languages is a long-standing problem. In this book, San Duanmu proposes a solution that relies on the notion of contrast: X and Y are different sounds if and only if they contrast in some language. He focuses on a simple procedure to interpret empirical data: for each phonetic dimension, all inventories are searched in order to determine the maximal number of contrasts required. In addition, every unusual feature or extra degree of contrast is re-examined to confirm its validity. The resulting feature system is surprisingly simple: fewer features are needed than previously proposed, and for each feature, a two-way contrast is sufficient. Nevertheless, the proposal is reliable in that the notion of contrast is uncontroversial, the procedure is explicit, and the result is repeatable. The book also offers discussion of non-contrastive differences between languages, sound classes, and complex sounds such as affricates, consonant-glide units, consonant-liquid units, contour tones, pre-nasalized stops, clicks, ejectives, and implosives.
Traditionally, research on human language has taken speech and written language as the only domains of investigation. However, there is now a wealth of empirical studies documenting visual aspects of language, ranging from rich studies of sign languages, which are self-contained visual language systems, to the field of gesture studies, which examines speech-associated gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily movements related to communicative expressions. But despite this large body of work, sign language and gestures are rarely treated together in theoretical discussions. This volume aims to remedy that by considering both types of visual language jointly in order to transcend (artificial) theoretical divides, and to arrive at a comprehensive account of the human language faculty. This collection seeks to pave the way for an inherently multimodal view of language, in which visible actions of the body play a crucial role. The 19 papers in this volume address four broad and overlapping topics: (1) the multimodal nature of language; (2) multimodal representation of meaning; (3) multimodal and multichannel prosody; and (4) acquisition and development of visual language in children and adults.
Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.
This collection of articles is the result of the second meeting of the Mesopotamian Literature Group (Groningen), held in Groningen from 12 till 14 July 1993. The topics treated by these scholars from six countries range from theoretical issues to specific analyses, from broad structures to linguistic textures, including metaphorical language as well as phonic features; also, various poetical techniques and strategies are studied. The interest is more in the questions that are raised than in the answers given, and the matter of legitimization of our theoretical bases runs throughout most contributions, this being the aim of the Group.
This volume presents both an analysis of how identities are built, represented and negotiated in narrative, as well as a theoretical reflection on the links between narrative discourse and identity construction. The data for the book are Mexican immigrants' personal experience narratives and chronicles of their border crossings into the United States. Embracing a view of identity as a construct firmly grounded in discourse and interaction, the author examines and illustrates the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of identity to the wider social contexts that frame the experience of migration, from material conditions of life in the United States to mainstream discourses about race and color. The analysis reveals how identities emerge in discourse through the interplay of different levels of expression, from implicit adherence to narrative styles and ways of telling, to explicit negotiation of membership categories.