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The Michif language -- spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada -- is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1997-06-05
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Japan and the United States are in closer contact politically and economically than ever before, yet in many ways our nations are as far from mutual understanding as ever. Misconceptions and miscommunications between East and West continue to plague this important...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1997-04-24
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A major concern in current anthropological thinking is that the method of recording or translating into writing a society's cultural expressions--dance, rituals, pottery, the social use of space, et al--cannot help but fundamentally alter the meaning of the living words...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1997-04-24
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Ghana has played a key role in African/Western relations since medieval times. For this reason and others,Ghana has evolved into a linguistic quilt that contains forty-four indigenous languages and several exotic ones, of which most Ghanians speak at least two. Using...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1997-02-13
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This book collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle--a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists,...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-11-28
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In this book, Chase Hensel examines how Yup'ik Eskimos and non-natives construct and maintain gender and ethnic identities through strategic talk about hunting, fishing, and processing. Although ethnicity is overtly constructed in terms of either/or categories, the...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-11-28
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Theories of language espoused by linguists during much of this century have assumed that there is a hierarchy to the elements of language such that certain constructions, rules, and features are unmarked while others are marked; "play" for example, is unmarked or...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-08-22
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This book challenges the widespread belief that overzealous Americans forced unnecessary script reforms on an unprepared, unenthusiastic, but helpless Japan during the Occupation. Unger presents neglected historical evidence showing that the reforms implemented from...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-08-01
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Linguists who have studied simplified varieties of a given language, such as pidgins or the language of care-givers, have tended to explain similarities in their structure by the fact that they use the same mechanisms of simplification. Bruthiaux tests this idea by...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-07-11
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Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-06-27
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Historical reconstruction of languages relies on the comparative method, which itself depends on the notion of the regularity of change. The regularity of sound change is the famous Neogrammarian Hypothesis: "sound change takes place according to laws that admit no...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-05-16
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The essays collected in this volume, most previously unpublished, address a number of closely interconnected issues raised by the comparative syntax of functional heads within the Principles-and-Parameters approach.The general theory of head movement, the properties of...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-04-25
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Sound-symbolism occurs when words resemble the sounds associated with the phenomena they attempt to describe, rather than an arbitrary representation. For example the word raven is arbitrary in that it does not resemble a raven; cuckoo, however, is sound -symbolic in...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-04-18
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Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? In Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-04-11
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Common among the world's languages is the phenomenon of classification, a partly or fully grammatical division of the noun lexicon into distinct classes that ultimately derives from the human need to classify and filter data on various levels while communicating. In...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-03-14
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The work of the linguist Charles A. Ferguson spans more than three decades, and is remarkable for having been consistently at the forefront of scholarship on the relationship between language and society. This volume collects his most influential and seminal papers,...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1996-02-15
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The study of language acquisition has taken on new meaning in the last decade. Now seen as part of the study of other forms of language variation across time and space, such as dialects and sociolects, and the study of pidgins and Creoles, it can help to provide a new...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1995-08-17
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In this book, Holmberg and Platzack present a theory of the role which subject-verb agreement and case morphology play in syntax. Their theory is based mainly on a detailed comparison and inflectional properties in the various Scandinavian languages, although many other...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1995-06-29
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This book elaborates a theory of ellipsis that sheds new light on a well-known phenomenon, bringing it under the aegis of general and universal principles. Lobeck argues that ellipted categories in IP (VP Ellipsis), DP (N' Ellipsis), and CP (Sluicing) are empty,...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1995-06-22
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Suffixaufnahme is an unusual pattern of multiple case marking due to agreement: a nominal that is already case-marked for its own adnominal function in addition copies the case of the nominal to which it is to be related. The essays in this collection comprehensively...
Editeur :
Oxford University Press
Parution :
1995-06-01
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