This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

This book is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the native North American languages. These several hundred languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. The book includes an overview of their special characteristics, descriptions of special styles, a catalog of the languages that details their locations, genetic affiliations, number of speakers, and major structural features, and lists published material on them.

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

This volume presents significant developments in the field of Montague Grammar and outlines its past and future contributions to philosophy and linguistics. The contents are as follows:

Introduction by Steven Davis and Marianne Mithun

Emmon Bach, "Montague Grammar and Classical Transformational Grammar"

Barbara H. Partee, "Constraining Transformational Montague Grammar: A Framework and a Fragment"

James D. McCawley, "Helpful Hints to the Ordinary Working Montague Grammarian"

Terence Parsons, "Type Theory and Ordinary Language"

David R. Dowty, "Dative 'Movement' and Thomason's Extensions of Montague Grammar"

Muffy E. A. Siegel, "Measure Adjectives in Montague Grammar"

Michael Bennett, "Mass Nouns and Mass Terms in Montague Grammar"

Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof, "Infinitives and Context in Montague Grammar"

James Waldo, "A PTQ Semantics for Sortal Incorrectness"

These essays were drawn from the papers presented at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1976. The contents are as follows:Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, "Introduction: North American Indian Historical Linguistics in Current Perspective"Ives Goddard, "Comparative Algonquian"Marianne Mithun, "Iroquoian"Wallace L. Chafe, "Caddoan"David S. Rood, "Siouan"Mary R. Haas, "Southeastern Languages"James M. Crawford, "Timucua and Yuchi: Two Language Isolates of the Southeast"Ives Goddard, "The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande"Irvine Davis, "The Kiowa-Tanoan, Keresan, and Zuni Languages"Susan Steele, "Uto-Aztecan: An Assessment for Historical andComparative Linguistics"William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Hokan lnter-Branch Comparisons"Margaret Langdon, "Some Thoughts on Hokan with Particular Reference to Pomoan and Yuman"Michael Silverstein, ''Penutian: An Assessment"Laurence C. Thompson, "Salishan and the Northwest"William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Wakashan Comparative Studies"William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Chimakuan Comparative Studies"Michael E. Krauss, "Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut"Lyle CampbelI, "Middle American Languages"Eric S. Hamp, "A Glance from Now On."