Language and Linguistics E-Books Online, Collection 2012

Series:  Language and Linguistics E-Books Online, Volume: 2012 and  Humanities and Social Sciences E-Books Online, Volume: 2012
Author:
Various Authors & Editors
Search for other papers by Various Authors & Editors in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Brill's Language and Linguistics E-Books Online, Collection 2012 is the electronic version of the book publication program of Brill in the field of Language and Linguistics in 2012.

Coverage:
Linguistics, Indigenous languages, Semantics, Reference, Literacy, Grammar, Phonetics

This E-Book Collection is part of Brill's Language and Linguistics E-Books Online Collection.

The title list and free MARC records are available for download here.

For other pricing options, consortium arrangements and free 30-day trials contact us at sales-us@brill.com (the Americas) or sales-nl@brill.com (Europe, Middle East, Africa & Asia-Pacific).

Please contact our sales team for more information on prices and licensing.

The Changing Politics of Language Choice
The book was co-edited by Brian Spooner, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Language policy in Central Asia, Afghanistan and the immediately surrounding neighboring countries has a long and varied history. The Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 have left the area in a state of flux. This volume gives a better picture about what is official and explicit, what is not official but implicit or general practice, and what the likely future developments might be. It is very clear that multilingualism, whether it involves Persian, Russian or English in addition to other languages, not only has long been a part of the scene, but will probably continue to be so.
At long last, with Professor Fähnrich’s Georgische Sprache here is a systematic description of the structure of the Georgian language. The book is divided into two parts, one for Old and the other for Modern Georgian. A separate section treats the main differences between the two.
Illustrated by a wealth of examples, an overview is given of characteristic features, the stages of development, phonetics, morphonology, morphology (word formation, formation of grammatical forms), syntax and aspects of the Georgian vocabulary.
The introduction presents readers with general information on the language, its history, importance, position among, and relationship with other Caucasian languages, dialects and written traditions.
In The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic, Nicholas Zair for the first time collects and assesses all the words from the Celtic languages which contained a laryngeal, and identifies the regular results of the laryngeals in each phonetic environment. This allows him to formulate previously unrecognised sound changes affecting Proto-Celtic, and assess the competing explanations for other developments. This work has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the historical phonology and morphology of the Celtic languages, and for etymological work involving the Celtic language, along with implications for Indo-European sound laws and the Indo-European syllable. A major conclusion is that the laryngeals cannot be used to argue for an Italo-Celtic language family.
Forms and Functions
Author:
Past research on the Sabellian languages has been devoted mainly to the phonetic and morphological features of these languages as elements for the reconstruction of the prehistoric stages of Latin. The present book aims at analysing the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of a subset of grammatical terms, the demonstratives. It contains a thorough description of their synchronic behaviour, which permits both a comparison to the Latin data with new hypotheses on the epigraphic genres in Republican Italy and a reconstruction of the Italic origins of these terms based on typological principles. Neither the grammar of Sabellian nor the pragmatic scope of the Sabellian inscriptions should be considered a priori identical to their Latin comparanda.
In Benasní – I Remember: Dene Sųłiné Oral Histories with Morphological Analysis, Josh Holden presents twelve autobiographical narratives about cultural change from Dene Sųłiné elders in an Aboriginal community in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. In ten interviews and two monologues, the speakers recount their 20th century: the rhythms of traditional life, the catastrophe of epidemics and language loss, the dizzying technological changes, their ambivalence over the past and their anxieties for the future. Accompanying the original Dene texts and free translation is an analytical interlinear gloss applying rigorous morphological and semantic principles to the parsing and glossing of words. The innovative interlinearization distinguishes grammar from visible etymologies. The volume contains a morphological sketch to illuminate grammatical issues in the interlinearization.
A Literary Translation with Commentary
The Book of Job in Form presents to the reader a platform for a personal and intensive encounter with a great work of art. Its bilingual centre offers the text in Hebrew and English, and shows the forty poems in their original form, in 412 strophes and 165 stanzas. The commentary points out how these proportions and the remarkable precision of the poet (who counted syllables on all text levels) affect the thematics of the book, so that the portrait of the hero can be redrawn; his stubbornly defended integrity meets vindication and his last words, generally misunderstood, require a positive understanding. The poetry and its slim framework in prose are a unified composition which deserves a synchronic approach.
A Syntactic Account of Malagasy Nominalizations
This book provides a detailed study of nominalizing patterns in Malagasy (Austronesian) and discusses the broader theoretical issues that arise from these patterns. It explores new and original fieldwork data drawn from the largely unexplored domain of Malagasy deverbal nominals. Offering new insights to long-standing puzzles in the derivation of argument-structure, referential, and clausal nominals, the book promotes a single structure-building mechanism, which allows nominalizers to attach at different heights in the clausal spine to derive nominals with different morphosyntactic properties. In addition, it provides a novel analysis of participant nominalizations, showing that they are derived through the same mechanism that derives relative clauses, and thus setting the stage for new and exciting research directions.
Writing Across Borders
The Idea of Writing is an exploration of the versatility of writing systems. This volume, the second in a series, is specifically concerned with the problems and possibilities of adapting a writing system to another language. Writing is studied as it is used across linguistic and cultural borders from ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and Korean writing to Japanese, Kharosthi and Near Eastern scripts. This collection of articles aims to highlight the complexity of writing systems rather than to provide a first introduction. The different academic traditions in which these writing systems have been studied use linguistic, socio-historical and philological approaches that give complementary insights of the complex phenomena.
Studies Presented to Ramzi Baalbaki on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday
Editor:
The collection of articles in this volume is dedicated to Ramzi Baalbaki of the American University of Beirut on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The volume reflects the central themes of Ramzi Baalbaki’s scholarly work: history of Arabic grammar, Arabic lexicography, Arabic linguistics, comparative Semitics, Arabic epigraphy, and textual editing of classical texts. It provides intellectual, literary, and social historians, as well as Arabists, philologists, and linguists with an interesting glimpse into the early medieval and modern traditions related to the Arabic language, its grammar, historical development, and demonstrates its centrality to other fields of study such as Qur’ānic studies, adab, folk literature, sufism, and poetry.

Contributors include: Nadia Anghelescu, Georgine Ayoub, Aziz Azmeh, Monique Bernards, Georges Bohas, Gerhard Böwering, Michael Carter, Everhard Ditters, Geert Jan van Gelder, Hassan Hamzé, Peter Heath, Pierre Larcher, Ibrahim Ben Mrad, Bilal Orfali, Wadād al-Qāḍī, Angelika Neuwirth, Karin Ryding, Yasir Suleiman, Kees Versteegh, and David Wilmsen
Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket lays bare crucial roles played by community and resistance in the refashioning of heritage languages. Robin Sabino draws on her community relationships, her fieldwork with a last speaker, and research from a range of disciplines, to advance a revisionist history that elucidates the African linguistic resources used to create community in a land those who were transhipped did not choose and from which they could not return. In parallel fashion, the narrative locates the partial appropriation of creole features by the colony’s Euro-Caribbean community in the emergence of local identity. It also traces the replacement of Dutch and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole with their English counterparts.

Includes more than 300 unique sound records of the last native speaker.
With an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture
Author:
This monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal. The language is spoken by upwards of 30,000 people belonging to an ethnic group of the same name. The Thangmi are one of Nepal’s least documented communities.
These two volumes include a grammatical description of the Dolakha dialect of Thangmi, a collection of glossed oral texts and a comprehensive lexicon with relevant examples. In addition, the reader will find an extensive ethnolinguistic introduction to the speakers and their culture.
For students and scholars of anthropology and linguistics, this study is a compelling illustration of the interweaving of these disciplines in the context of Himalayan studies.
With financial support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (www.iias.nl).
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.
Meaning and Use
In the Modern Mongolian language there are four verb forms which have traditionally been labelled as past tense markers, differing primarily in aspect. In the last two decades scholars have suspected that the past tenses endings may actually differ by marking evidentiality and inferentiality. The present study not only confirms this, but, using 350 glossed and analyzed examples drawn from a variety of sources, shows distinctions of degrees of remoteness as well, and details significant differences between the spoken and written languages.
In The Role of Zion/Jerusalem in Isaiah 40–55: A Corpus-Linguistic Approach Reinoud Oosting offers a linguistic and literary analysis of the Biblical Hebrew text of Isaiah 40-55, focusing on the depiction of Zion/Jerusalem in these chapters. The analysis shows that the designations 'Zion' and 'Jerusalem' are not used interchangeably but are instead two sides of the same coin. The name 'Zion' is related to the return of the Israelite exiles from Babylon, while the name ‘Jerusalem’ is related to the rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem. Concentrating on the linguistic and literary features of Isaiah 40-55, Reinoud Oosting proves that the signals in the text are extremely helpful for current readers to grasp the meaning of this ancient text.
In The Subjunctive Mood in Arabic Grammatical Thought Arik Sadan outlines the grammatical theories on the naṣb (subjunctive mood) in Classical Arabic. Examining over 160 treatises written by 85 grammarians, lexicographers and Qurʾān commentators, the author defines and characterizes the opinions of medieval Arab grammarians concerning this mood in the verbal system of Classical Arabic. Special attention is given to the prominent early grammarians Sībawayhi (d. ca. 180/796) and al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/822), who represent the Schools of al-Baṣra and al-Kūfa respectively.
The analysis of the grammarians’ views enables the author to draw several important conclusions and hypotheses on the syntactic environments of the subjunctive mood, the dialectal differences relating to its employment and the historical changes and developments it underwent.

Sībawayhi and Early Arabic Grammatical Theory
This volume is intended as the first in a series of studies on traditional Arab linguistic theories concentrating on Sībawayhi and his grammatical legacy. Here, the reader is introduced to the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Arabic grammar and presents Sībawayhi in the context of his intellectual and social environment. The papers make significant contributions to and offer in-depth introductions into major aspects of the foundations of Arab Linguistics, early Syriac and medieval Hebrew linguistic traditions. This is a unique reference on the three main Semitic linguistic traditions, accompanied by a detailed analysis of some grammatical and pragmatic aspects of Kitāb Sībawayhi in the light of modern theories and scholarship.

Contributors include: M. G. Carter, Hanadi Dayyeh, Manuela E.B. Giolfo, Mohamed Hnid, Almog Kasher, Geoffrey Khan, Daniel King, Amal Marogy, Avigail S. Noy, Arik Sadan, Haruko Sakaedani
Diachrony and Synchrony
Volume Editors: and
In recent scholarship, the connection between Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic is studied in a more systematic way. The idea of studying these two varieties in one theoretical frame is quite new, and was initiated at the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Middle and Mixed Arabic (AIMA). At these conferences, the members of AIMA discuss the latest insights into the definition, terminology, and research methods of Middle and Mixed Arabic. Results of various discussions in this field are to be found in the present book, which contains articles describing and analysing the linguistic features of Muslim, Jewish and Christian Arabic texts (folklore, religious and linguistic literature) as well as the matters of mixed language and diglossia.

Contributors include: Berend Jan Dikken, Lutz Edzard, Jacques Grand’Henry, Bruno Halflants, Benjamin Hary, Rachel Hasson Kenat, Johannes den Heijer, Amr Helmy Ibrahim, Paolo La Spisa, Jérôme Lentin, Gunvor Mejdell, Arie Schippers, Yosef Tobi, Kees de Vreugd, Manfred Woidich, and Otto Zwartjes.
Genealogical linguistics and areal linguistics are rarely treated from an integrated perspective even if they are twin faces of diachronic linguistics. In Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology Lars Johanson and Martine Robbeets take up this challenge. The result is a wealth of empirical facts and different theoretical approaches, advanced by internationally renowned specialists and young scholars whose research is highly pertinent to the topic.

Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology puts genealogical and areal explanation for shared morphology in a balanced perspective and works out criteria to distinguish between morphological cognates and copies. Lars Johanson and Martine Robbeets provide nothing less than the foundations for a new perspective on diachronic linguistics between genealogical and areal linguistics.

Contributors include: Alexandra Aikhenvald, Ad Backus, Dik Bakker, Peter Bakker, Éva Csató, Stig Eliasson, Victor Friedman, Francesco Gardani, Anthony Grant, Salomé Gutiérrez-Morales, Tooru Hayasi, Ewald Hekking, Juha Janhunen, Lars Johanson, Brian Joseph, Folke Josephson, Judith Josephson, Johanna Nichols, Martine Robbeets, Marshall Unger, Nikki van de Pol, Anna Verschik, Lindsay Whaley.
  • Collapse
  • Expand