Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole

Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole
Author: Francis Byrne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027252238
GET BOOK

Download Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

With English and Portuguese as parent languages; the significant lexical retention of African languages; and the relative isolation of its speakers, Saramaccan has always stood out among Creole languages. Yet despite its obvious interest Saramaccan received little in the way of scholarly study. This groundbraking monograph dispels the mystery surrounding Saramaccan and provides strong evidence for a new approach to Creole origins. The study is carried out within the government-binding framework. The author shows how Saramaccan comes close to demonstrating what constitues the irreducible minimum of building blocks with which a language can be constructed, and the types of structure which must develop under such conditions. In this work Frank Byrne combines the outcome of patient and persevering fieldwork with a firm grasp of current theoretical issues and provides us with the insights into the nature of universal grammar of which a Creole like Saramaccan is potentially capable.

Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages

Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
Author: Francis Byrne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 347
Release: 1993-10-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027276943
GET BOOK

Download Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The volume has as its topic, not only the types of formal constructions and devices which creole languages syntactically utilize to achieve constituent focus, but also, in a much broader sense, the many other phenomena and processes found in these languages which serve to highlight sentence-level elements. The book is organized into five sections: 1. verb focus, predicate clefting and predicate doubling; 2. focus and anti-focus; 3. focus and pronominals; 4. discourse patterning; 5. grammatical relations.

Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages

Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
Author: Francis Byrne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027252335
GET BOOK

Download Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

For review see: Silvia Kouwenberg, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 3 & 4 (1996); p. 369-371.

A Grammar of Saramaccan Creole

A Grammar of Saramaccan Creole
Author: John McWhorter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311027826X
GET BOOK

Download A Grammar of Saramaccan Creole Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Saramaccan has been central to various debates regarding the origin and nature of creole languages. Being the most removed of all English-based creoles from European language structure in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax, it has been seen as one of the most extreme instantiations of the creolization process. This is the first full-length description of Saramaccan. The grammar documents, in particular, a valence-sensitive system of indicating movement and direction via serial verb constructions, hitherto overlooked amidst the generalized phenomenon of serialization itself.

Grammatical Relations

Grammatical Relations
Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1997-11-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027275785
GET BOOK

Download Grammatical Relations Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This volume presents a functional perspective on grammatical relations (GRs) without neglecting their structural correlates. Ever since the 1970s, the discussion of RGs by functionally-oriented linguists has focused primarily on their functional aspects, such as reference, cognitive accessibility and discourse topicality. With some exceptions, functionalists have thus ceded the discussion of the structural correlates of GRs to various formal schools. Ever since Edward Keenan’s pioneering work on subject properties (1975, 1976), it has been apparent that subjecthood and objecthood can only be described properly by a basket of neither necessary nor sufficient properties — thus within a framework akin to Rosch’s theory of Prototype. Some GR properties are functional (reference, topicality, accessibility); others involve overt coding (word-order, case marking, verb agreement). Others yet are more abstract, involving control of grammatical processes (rule-governed behavior). Building on Keenan’s pioneering work, this volume concentrates on the structural aspects of GRs within a functionalist framework. Following a theoretical introduction, the papers in the volume deal primarily with recalcitrant typological issues: The dissociation between overt coding properties of GRs and their behavior-and-control properties; GRs in serial verb constructions; GRs in ergative languages; The impact of clause union and grammaticalization on GRs.

A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole

A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole
Author: Silvia Kouwenberg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 713
Release: 2011-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110885700
GET BOOK

Download A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Ndyuka

Ndyuka
Author: George L. Huttar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2003-09-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136861726
GET BOOK

Download Ndyuka Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This volume constitutes what is perhaps the most thorough description of a creole language to date. Following the Descriptive Grammar Series outline, it provides detailed coverage of a full range of grammatical, phonological and lexical information, written with the interests of formalists and functionalists, creolists and students of language universals and typology in mind. Expressions of lin-uistic judgements by both native and trained native speakers of Ndyuka combine with close study of texts to provide a solid basis for the work. More than two thousand examples of constructions and forms are considered in context and these give the careful reader a rich picture of all the stuctural and functional aspects of this radical creole. The authors' close acquaintance with the Ndyuka language community spans more than 25 years and allows the intuitions of Ndyuka speakers to show through clearly. Numerous cross references and an index of forms and topics of special interest supplement the detailed table of contents, facilitating the testing of hypotheses on language universals, typology, creolization, and processes such as clefting, relativization and verb serialization.

Interlingual Processes

Interlingual Processes
Author: Hans-Wilhelm Dechert
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1989
Genre: Contrastive linguistics
ISBN: 9783823340706
GET BOOK

Download Interlingual Processes Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Predication in Caribbean English Creoles

Predication in Caribbean English Creoles
Author: Donald Winford
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 429
Release: 1993-01-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027276951
GET BOOK

Download Predication in Caribbean English Creoles Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization. The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).