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Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,678
Discovery Miles 26 780
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Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (Hardcover, New)
Series: mersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Scholars have long sought to discover whether there is a detectable
genetic relationship among the world's languages, whether
linguistic methods can demonstrate that all of the world's
languages evolved from a single "mother tongue". In this book,
Johanna Nichols offers original and important material that is
likely to change significantly the way this exploration is
conducted. For over a century, the comparative method has been the
principle analytic tool in the reconstruction of prehistoric
languages from which historically attested languages have
developed. This method looks for regular laws which govern sound
correspondences among the cognate words of related languages. The
problem with cross-linguistic work based on theories of sameness is
that it is necessarily limited to seeking genetic relatedness and
reducing structural variety to types. It is restricted to shallow
time depths and cannot draw inferences from diversity. But unless
it is fairly well understood in what ways languages may group and
differ over great depths of time within a geographical area,
speculation about whether a certain isolated shared feature signals
a genetic relationship is futile. In this groundbreaking book,
Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting
linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, and thereby
provides the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon
population science. Using a database of 174 languages representing
the world's linguistic families and surveying a number of
structural features and grammatical categories as well as
geographical distribution, Nichols establishes the relative
frequencies and markedness of grammatical properties,
theirinteraction with each other, their relative diachronic
stability, and their correlations with geographical location and
type of linguistic area. Maps, tables, appendices, and a
reproduction of the sample and database will enable readers to test
Nichols's conclusions, explore further hypotheses, expand existing
databases, and assign cross-linguistic problems to students. This
book will be of critical interest to linguists, archaeologists,
population specialists, and anyone interested in ways of
classifying mankind.
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