Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Historical & Comparative

Saramaccan has been central to various debates regarding the origin and nature of creole languages. Being the most removed of all English-based creoles from European language structure in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax, it has been seen as one of the most extreme instantiations of the creolization process. This is the first full-length description of Saramaccan. The grammar documents, in particular, a valence-sensitive system of indicating movement and direction via serial verb constructions, hitherto overlooked amidst the generalized phenomenon of serialization itself.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies...

The intention of the present volume is to unite the research of a range of scholars who have been working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. Features common to an area can be due to (i) shared dialect input, (ii) common but separate innovations after settlement, or (iii) area-internal diffusion from one variety to another and/or others. The relative weighting of these factors is an important topic in the book and is a key focus in the 17 chapters.

The book is divided into two large...

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil--language, literature, and civilization--emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography.

Two stories animate Shulman's...

Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under...

Die Frage nach den Bedingungen, Formen und Wirkungen gelungener Gesprache ist im 20. Jahrhundert in den verschiedensten wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen wie Philosophie, Soziologie, Padagogik, Theologie und Sprachwissenschaft gestellt und ganz unterschiedlich beantwortet worden. Das Buch untersucht solche normativen Gesprachstheorien des deutschsprachigen Raums im Hinblick auf die in ihnen zum Ausdruck kommenden Idealvorstellungen des Gesprachs, die als Manifestationen eines mit der kommunikativen Wirklichkeit in Wechselwirkung stehenden Sprachbewusstseins aufgefasst werden. Die untersuchten...