Product Description: Cambodian is in many respects a typical Southeast Asian language, whose syntax at least on first acquaintance seems to approximate that of any SVO pidgin. On closer acquaintance, however, because of the richness of its idioms, the language seems to be a forbiddingly alien form of “Desesperanto” – a language of which one can read a page and understand every word individually, and have no inkling of what the page was all about...read more

Traditionally the study of syntax is restricted to the study of what goes on within the boundaries of the prosodic sentence. Although the nature of clause combining within a prosodic sentence has always been a central concern of traditional syntax (in GG, e.g. it underlies important research on deletion and anaphora), work within a discourse analysis framework has hardly been done. Analyses like this are given in the present volume.

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Product Description: There is no country in the world where as many different languages are spoken as in New Guinea, approximately a fifth of the languages in the world. Most of these so-called Papuan languages seem to be unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere...read more

Product Description: The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way...read more

Product Description: The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way...read more

Product Description: The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way...read more

The view that language is in some way 'arbitrary', that there is no formal relationship between a linguistic message and the thought it is meant to convey, is long established and pervasive. The goal of John Haiman's study is to challenge the monopoly of arbitrariness, which he believes has affected in significant ways many models of linguistic description and analysis, notably those proposed by Saussure and more recently by Chomsky and his associates. Linguistic structures, Dr Hainian claims, may be compared to (non-linguistic) diagrams of our thoughts, and deviate from iconicity in many of the same ways and for much the same reasons as do diagrams in general. Arbitrariness develops as a result of the relatively familiar principles of economy, generalization and association. In relation to this thesis, Dr Haiman considers a wide variety of constructions, including conditionals and interrogatives, gapping, causative structures, auxiliaries and reflexives, and provides a wealth of exemplification from different languages that also points to typological differences in respect of iconicity.

Product Description: The Rhaeto-Romance languages have been known as such to the linguistic community since the pioneering studies of Ascoli and Gartner over a century ago. There has never been a community of RR speakers based on a common history or polity and the various dialects are mutually unintelligible, but a unity, based on a number of common features, has been advanced...read more

Product Description: Canonical switch-reference is an inflectional category of the verb, which indicates whether or not its subject is identical with the subject of some other verb. Switch-reference may be analyzed from a structural or a functional point of view...read more

Product Description: Putting aside questions of truth and falsehood, the old "talk is cheap" maxim carries as much weight as ever. Indeed, perhaps more. For one need not be an expert in irony or sarcasm to realize that people don't necessarily mean what they say...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)