South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. Each volume will have four major sections: I. Invited contributions consisting of state-of-the-art essays on research in South Asian languages. II. Refereed open submissions focusing on relevant issues and providing various viewpoints. III. Reports from around the world, book reviews and abstracts of doctoral theses.

This groundbreaking collection showcases Jenny Cheshire's influential work in bringing greater attention to quantitative analysis of socio-grammatical variation and builds upon her contributions with new lines of inquiry pushing sociolinguistic research forward. Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, the volume is structured in six parts with a particular focus on syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, each section turning a lens on a different aspect of socio-grammatical variation. The first sections of the volume focus on the role of structure, its relevance for sociolinguistic production and perception and the impact of social structure on formal structure. Two sections look at the interface of variationist research with other aspects of linguistic research, including generative syntax and discourse-pragmatic features. The final sections consider the importance of integrating broader external factors in socio-grammatical variation, exploring the impact of interactional pressures in the sociolinguistic environment and the role of multi-ethnic contact varieties. Taken together, this volume demonstrates the critical role of socio-grammatical variation in our understanding of language change as a holistic process.

Practical Chinese Usage offers post-beginner to near advanced students of Chinese a guide to the most frequently misused and confusing words in the language. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order for ease of reference. Sample sentences with pinyin and English translations are provided after each explanation. Examples of typical mistakes made by students are clearly marked throughou. Each entry is annotated in accordance with the New HSK guidelines, indicating the level of difficulty. Practical Chinese Usage provides students of Chinese with the necessary tools to refine their use of expressions and synonyms in order to communicate effectively in the Chinese language.

This volume introduces the study of language attrition - the forgetting of language. In this first collection devoted to second language attrition, the contributors focus on contexts of loss where Japanese is either the attriting language, or the replacing language. Bringing together research to substantiate previous hypotheses in the field, this book offers new theoretical and practical insights for those interested in language change.

Classification of parts of speech in Chinese is tough due to the lack of morphological differences, and thus is short of in-depth investigation and exploration. Based on the analysis and research of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book elaborates on the system of Chinese parts of speech and proposes a set of criteria on their classification, contributing to relevant theoretical and methodological studies. To begin with, it examines the common characteristics and internal hierarchies of parts of speech, as well as the relationship between grammatical functions and parts of speech in modern Chinese. Then it puts forward the criteria on the classification of Chinese parts of speech, with a descriptive explanation of around 20 parts of speech. Besides, it illustrates the statistical studies on Chinese parts of speech, offering data support and corpus verification to the criteria. Also, it analyses the system of Chinese parts of speech from the perspective of typology. Specifically, it elucidates the correspondence between syntactic positions and parts of speech, functional differentiation of Chinese word items, etc. This book will be a valuable reference to researchers and students in Chinese linguistics. Learners of Chinese will also be attracted by it.

Polarity phenomena are pervasively observed in natural languages. Previous studies on Chinese polarity items are mainly in line with the non-veridicality approach. This book, however, employs the downward-entailing hypothesis as its analytical foundation, and argues that downward entailment is the only licensor for different kinds of Chinese polarity items, and non-veridicality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition and thus offers inferior explanatory power compared with the former. To begin with, it lays the groundwork for this research by presenting a brief introduction to polarity phenomena and reviewing the existing relevant theories. Then it addresses the status of the commonly used element dou in Chinese. Specifically, it applies the tripartite structural frame to the studies of dou, and examines the role of dou in licensing the polarity items. Moreover, it investigates the properties and behavior of dou with respect to modality. Based on the analysis above, it observes that non-interrogative wh-indeterminates in Chinese can be licensed in the restriction domain of a necessity operator. Also, the non-uniformity of three Chinese polarity items, i.e., shenme, na-CL, and renhe, is scrutinized within the downward-entailing framework. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers and students in the field of linguistics, especially in the areas of formal semantics and generative grammar. Researchers and engineers in cloud computing and big data who are seeking help from linguistic contributions to meaning and logic will also benefit from it.

This volume collects eleven papers written between 1991 and 2016, some of them unpublished, which explore various aspects of the architecture of grammar in a minimalist perspective. The phenomena that are brought to bear on the architectural issue come from a range of languages, among them French, European Portuguese, Welsh, German and English, and include clitic placement, expletive pronouns, resumption, causative structures, copulative and existential constructions, VP ellipsis, as well as the distinction between the SVO, VSO and V2 linguistic types. This book sheds a new light on the division of labor between components and paves the way for further research on grammatical architecture.

The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity focuses on the semantic structure of Chinese classifiers under the cognitive linguistics framework, and the implications thereof on linguistic relativity and language acquisition. It examines the semantic correlation between a given classifier and its associated nouns. Nouns in Chinese, which are assigned specific classifiers according to their selected characteristics, reflect the process of human categorization. The concrete categories formed by the relationship between nouns and classifiers may serve to explain the conceptual structure of the Chinese language and certain underlying aspects of culture and human cognition. Song Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese for the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at university of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and philosophy.

This book defends a version of linguistic idealism, the thesis that the world is a product of language. In the course of defending this radical thesis, Gaskin addresses a wide range of topics in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and syntax theory. Starting from the context and compositionality principles, and the idea of a systematic theory of meaning in the Tarski-Davidson tradition, Gaskin argues that the sentence is the primary unit of linguistic meaning, and that the main aspects of meaning, sense and reference, are themselves theoretical posits. Ontology, which is correlative with reference, emerges as language-driven. This linguistic idealism is combined with a realism that accepts the objectivity of science, and it is accordingly distinguished from empirical pragmatism. Gaskin contends that there is a basic metaphysical level at which everything is expressible in language; but the vindication of linguistic idealism is nuanced inasmuch as there is also a derived level, asymmetrically dependant on the basic level, at which reality can break free of language and reach into the realms of the unnameable and indescribable. Language and World will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and linguistics.

The book deals with the development of descriptive models of English grammar writing during the Early Modern English period. For the first time, morphology and syntax as presented in Early Modern English grammars are systematically investigated as a whole. The statements of the contemporary grammarians are compared to hypotheses made in modern descriptions of Early Modern English and, where necessary, checked against the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus. Thus, a comprehensive overview of the characteristic features of Early Modern English is complemented by conclusions about the descriptive adequacy of Early Modern English grammars. It becomes evident that comments by contemporary authors occasionally reflect the corpus data more adequately than the statements found in modern secondary literature. This book is useful for (advanced) university students, as well as for scholars of English and grammarians in general.

This innovative grammar text is an ideal resource for writers, language students, and classroom teachers who need an accessible refresher in a step-by-step guide to essential grammar. Rather than becoming mired in overly detailed linguistic definitions, Nancy Sullivan helps writers and students understand and apply grammatical concepts and develop the skills they need to enhance their writing. Along with engaging discussions of both contemporary and traditional terminology, Sullivan's text provides clear explanations of the basics of English grammar and a practical, hands-on approach to mastering the use of language. Complementing the focus on constructing excellent sentences, every example and exercise set is contextually grounded in language themes. This updated edition includes new sections in each chapter on Writing Matters (addressing key tools and concerns for writers) and Language Matters (addressing issues of social and regional dialect variation). This is an ideal textbook for any writing course across disciplines where grammatical precision is important. Online resources including additional exercises, links, and an answer key are available at www.Routledge.com/9780367148683. Instructor materials accompanying the text provide teachers with activities designed for face-to-face, hybrid, and online instruction to enliven these basic grammar lessons as well as writing activities to integrate these concepts into students' own writing.

The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal and descriptive syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques-ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches-to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three parts, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Part I focuses on structural patterns, Part II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Part III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to anyone researching or studying Hispanic and Ibero-Romance linguistics.

Chinese grammar is characterized by its simple structure, lack of inflections, and wide use of monosyllabic morphemes. With the increased popularity of learning Chinese as a second language, there is a demand for a guide to Chinese grammar that's targeted at second language learners. This four-volume set is one of the earliest and most influential works of Chinese grammar, with a special focus on teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. Drawing on rich teaching experience, the authors analyze a myriad of real world examples to describe Chinese grammatical phenomena and rules while introducing the general grammar system of Chinese. This volume introduces sentence constituents in modern Chinese grammar, including subjects, objects, attributes, adverbials, complements, double references, and parentheses. Since the first edition came out in 1983, this set has been revised twice and remained one of the best sellers in the field. Practitioners and scholars of teaching Chinese as a second language, as well as students with a basic knowledge of Chinese, will find it to be a handy reference.

Chinese grammar is characterized by its simple structure, lack of inflections, and wide use of monosyllabic morphemes. With the increased popularity of learning Chinese as a second language, there is a demand for a guide to Chinese grammar that's targeted at second language learners. This four-volume set is one of the earliest and most influential works of Chinese grammar, with a special focus on teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. Drawing on rich teaching experience, the authors analyze a myriad of real-world examples to describe Chinese grammatical phenomena and rules while introducing the general grammar system of Chinese. In addition, the use of notional words in modern Chinese grammar is demonstrated, including nouns, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Since the first edition came out in 1983, this set has been revised twice and has remained one of the best sellers in the field. Practitioners and scholars of teaching Chinese as a second language, as well as students with a basic knowledge of Chinese, will find it to be a handy reference.

Chinese grammar is characterized by its simple structure, lack of inflections, and wide use of monosyllabic morphemes. With the increased popularity of learning Chinese as a second language, there is a demand for a guide to Chinese grammar that's targeted at second language learners. This four-volume set is one of the earliest and most influential works of Chinese grammar, with a special focus on teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. Drawing on rich teaching experience, the authors analyze a myriad of real-world examples to describe Chinese grammatical phenomena and rules while introducing the general grammar system of Chinese. This volume introduces several simple sentence and compound sentence structures of modern Chinese grammar. In addition, the authors examine discourse and other larger units of sentences in use. Since the first edition came out in 1983, this set has been revised twice and remained one of the best sellers in the field. Practitioners and scholars of teaching Chinese as a second language, as well as students with a basic knowledge of Chinese, will find it to be a handy reference.

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind. Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

This work, first published in 1994, provides a framework which covers the major aspects of contemporary standard Korean and allows cross-language comparisons. It offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive grammatical description of Korean, covering syntax, morphology, phonology, ideophone/interjections and lexicon.

Originally published in 1991, this book examines the process whereby a modern colloquial style of written Japanese was developed in the context of the overall modernization of Japan. The book examines the process whereby this strategic simplification took place in Japan, beginning with a discussion of the background to the problem and the reasons why change was indicated. The history, characteristics and spheres of the four major styles found in documents of the modern period are examined, as are initial moves towards language reform in the fields of education and printed media. Separate illustrations in Japanese script are provided to give an idea of the changing visual complexity of texts; in-text references, however, are romanized except where the use of characters is essential. Wherever possible, English sources are cited in addition to Japanese; where published translations are available, these are cited in order to enable non-speakers of Japanese to follow up references if they so desire.

Nantong Chinese is an in-depth account of an interesting and endangered Sinitic language spoken in Nantong, China, in an area in the Northern Yangtze River Delta about 800 square kilometers in size and 105 kilometers northwest of the city of Shanghai. The Chinese language consists of several hundred local varieties known as Sinitic languages or Chinese dialects, each representing a unique linguistic system. This book offers a comprehensive and systematic insight into one such system that is even more complex and more interesting than standard Mandarin. The unique vocalization and other linguistic features of Nantong Chinese make it unintelligible to most Chinese people. All the important linguistic aspects of Nantong Chinese are covered, including its phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic subsystems. Nantong Chinese will be of interest to professionals and students in linguistics worldwide.

Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume of original essays traces the origins of the concept of 'grammar'. In doing so, it charts the social, moral and cultural factors that have shaped the development of grammar from Antiquity, via the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern Europe, to current education systems and language learning pedagogy. The chapters examine key turning points in the history of language teaching epistemology, focusing on grammar for language teaching across different European cultural contexts. Bringing together leading scholars of classical and modern languages education, The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching offers the first single-source reference on the evolving concept of grammar across cultural and linguistic borders in Western language education. It therefore represents a valuable resource for teachers, teacher-educators and course designers, as well as students and scholars of historical linguistics, and of second and foreign language education.

The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following: * new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology * an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic * text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-by-word glossing as well as translation * new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference. This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.

Diachrony, Synchrony, and Typology of Tense and Aspect in Old Japanese reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese, which until now has not been examined using the tools of contemporary linguistic theory. Kazuha Watanabe analyzes syntactic distribution of the temporal suffixes in the Man'yoshu, an eighth-century poetry collection, and compares the results with data from well-attested languages. The author then integrates the semantic property of each suffix into the overall synchronic tense-aspect system of Old Japanese. Watanabe further compares the reconstructed system with the distributions of the same suffixes in Early Modern Japanese using Genji Monogatari, an eleventh-century novel, in order to provide further support for the synchronic analysis of Old Japanese. This approach is fundamentally different from traditional analyses, which identify the meanings of the temporal suffixes based on contextual information. In addition, previous analyses have produced a uniform analysis covering the entire 700-year period from Old to Early Modern Japanese. Instead, Watanabe proposes that Old Japanese had a temporal system distinct from the later period.

This book introduces 'performed' oral storytelling into the debate, using data from traditional and contemporary storytellers in French to explore the narrative tenses, the discourse-pragmatic effects of tense switching, as well as broader questions concerning the nature of oral discourse.