Kategoria BISAC: Foreign Language Study >> Indigenous Languages of the Americas

In Sounds Like Life, Janis Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words in Pastaza Quechua (a dialect of Quechua), which is spoken in eastern Ecuador. The use of sound-symbolic words is much more prevalent in Pastaza Quechua than in any other language,...

A celebration of western Washington Native language and culture, this book is a completely reformatted and greatly revised and expanded update of Thom Hess's Dictionary of Puget Salish (1976). Editor Dawn Bates integrates the field notes of Vi Hilbert, UpperSkagit elder and native speaker of Lushootseed, with Hess's analyses, mining information gathered by Hilbert and Hess from Skagit, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, Swinomish, Puyallup, and other Native consultants over a period of thirty years. The dictionary includes numerous example sentences taken from Lushootseed's rich tradition of...

In the mid-1970s, Sm'algyax, the language of the Coast Tsimshian people, came under the protection of Canada's Urgent Ethnology Programme, which commissioned a dictionary by linguist John Dunn. With the help of many Tsimshian consultants, Dunn completed the dictionary in 1978 and the first written grammar of the language in 1979. The dictionary quickly became the spelling authority for teachers, and together with the grammar has established a standard writing system for Sm'algyax that is in use throughout Alaska and British Columbia.

This 1995 publication, with a new preface and...

This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics-- telicity and durativity-- to the grammatical system of natural language.

The study of events, and of event characteristics, is an important testing ground for theories on the boundary between extralinguistic and linguistic knowledge, and on the relation between semantics and syntax. Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic, i.e., grammaticalized, representation of events.

The...