Rammar And Polity

Grammar and Polity

A Grammar of Semelai

Semelai is a previously undescribed and endangered Aslian (Mon-Khmer) language of the Malay Peninsula. This book - the first in-depth description of an Aslian language - provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Semelai. Semelai intertwines two types of morphological system: a concatenative system of prefixes, suffixes and a circumfix - acquired through extended contact with Malay - and a nonconcatenative system of prefixes and infixes (including infix reduplication), inherited from Mon-Khmer. There are distinctive word classes - Nominals, Verbs and Expressives - the latter iconic utterances which simultaneously provide information about the predicate and its arguments. Semelai has many derivational processes which change word class or affect transitivity, and it combines both head-marking and dependent-marking profiles. It also has a rich phonemic system of 20 vowels and 32 consonants. Nicole Kruspe's discussion is complemented with a generous number of illustrative examples and texts, creating a reference work that will be welcomed by descriptivists and typologists alike.

The Aesthetics of Grammar

The languages of mainland Southeast Asia evidence an impressive array of elaborate grammatical resources, such as echo words, phonaesthetic words, chameleon affixes, chiming derivatives, onomatopoeic forms, ideophones and expressives. Speakers of these languages fashion grammatical works of art in order to express and convey emotions, senses, conditions and perceptions that enrich discourse. This book provides a detailed comparative overview of the mechanisms by which aesthetic qualities of speech operate as part of speakers' grammatical knowledge. Each chapter focuses on a different language and explores the grammatical information of a number of well- and lesser-known languages from mainland Southeast Asia. It will be of great interest to syntacticians, morphologists, linguistic anthropologists, language typologists, cognitive scientists interested in language, and instructors of Southeast Asian languages.