A Guide To Gender And Classifiers
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A Guide to Gender and Classifiers
Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-02-12
This book explores the range of noun categorization devices found in the languages of the world, from the extensive systems of numeral classifiers in Southeast Asia to the highly grammaticalized gender agreement classes in Indo-European languages. Almost all languages use some type of noun categorization device in their grammar, with the most widespread being linguistic gender, whereby nouns are classified based on core semantic properties such as sex, animacy, humanness, or shape and size. Numeral classifiers are also common, and classify a noun in terms of its inherent nature, animacy, shape, and form, accompanied by a numeral or a quantifier. Other types of noun categorization devices include noun classifiers, possessive classifiers, verbal classifiers, and a number of rarer types such as locative and deictic classifiers. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald investigates all facets of these nominal categorization systems, from their form and distribution to their origins, development, and loss. Noun categorization devices provide unique insights into how people categorize the world through the language: in one language, a human might be classified in terms of orientation, hence as 'vertical', in another as male or female, and in another as simply 'animate' or even 'rational'. They also change as society changes, reflecting the ways in which language and social environment are integrated into a single whole.
The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes
Author: Matthias Urban
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-27
This volume presents the most comprehensive overview in English of the languages of the Central Andes, spoken primarily in Peru and Bolivia. Efforts to describe and document Central Andean languages, as well as philological research into colonial documentation and texts, have blossomed in recent decades; here, the major protagonists and drivers of these exciting developments are given the opportunity to showcase their research achievements in one volume. Following an introductory part providing background information on the region and its cultural and linguistic diversity, chapters in Part II provide extensive descriptions of individual languages that not only reflect current knowledge, but also add to our understanding of their phonological and grammatical structures. The third part offers substantial typological comparative analyses that reflect the pivotal role Central Andean languages have played in investigations into topics of current theoretical interest, such as the notions of linguistic complexity and evidentiality. Part IV explores topics relating to the history of the language from early prehistory to the colonial period, while chapters in the final part shed light on the cultural, geographic, and sociolinguistic settings in which Central Andean languages are spoken, and discuss language contact situations and language ideologies. The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes will be of interest not only to students and researchers specializing in Andean languages, but also to typologists, comparative linguists, and linguistic anthropologists.
Celebrating Indigenous Voice
Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date: 2023-01-30
Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas — New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.