Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork ethics and data processing, guidelines for the basic annotation of digitally-stored multimedia corpora and a discussion on how to build and maintain a language archive. It combines theoretical and practical considerations and makes specific...

This book proposes a new synthesis of the functions of proper names, from a semantic, pragmatic and syntactic perspective. Proper names are approached constructionally, distinguishing prototypical uses from more marked ones such as those in which names are used as common nouns. Since what is traditionally regarded as 'the' class of names turns out to be only one possible function of name-forms (though a prototypical one), the notion of 'proprial lemma' is introduced as the concept behind both proprial and appellative uses of such categories as place names and personal names. New formal...

As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of the genesis of the Germanic language, this book investigates the strong verbs of Proto-Germanic using a new approach that combines historical and typological morphology with quantitative etymology. It reveals that the morphological peculiarities and the etymological problems of the strong verbs have been considerably underestimated.

The first part of the book explains how drastically the inherited verb system was transformed when it was uniformized and simplified around a functionalized verbal ablaut. In particular, it is shown that...

The approximately 250 languages of the Tibeto-Burman family are spoken by 65 million speakers in ten different countries including Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma and China/Tibet. They are characterized by a fascinating linguistic, historical and cultural diversity. The languages spoken in the Himalayas, on their southern slopes and on the high Tibetan plateau in the north constitute the core of this diversity. Thus, the 21 papers mainly deal with these languages and some go even beyond to the area of the Blue Lake in northern Amdo and to southern Kham within linguistic Tibet.

Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies inAfrican Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus.

The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful...

Undertaking a broadscale experiment in theory and praxis, this book demonstrates grounds for insisting on a more integrational approach to dialectology while simultaneously demonstrating grounds for defining the hidden Phula languages of the Sino-Vietnam borderlands. The modern languages and their ancestral lineage are defined dialectically, through dynamic syntheses of correlative perspectives.