The Phonology of Chichewa

2017-06-02
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
The Phonology of Chichewa

Author: Laura J. Downing

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780191037733

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 208

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This book provides thorough descriptive and theory-neutral coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core phonological processes such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena such as High tone spread and the OCP, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface. Chichewa, in particular, has been a key language in the development of theoretical approaches to these phenomena. In this volume, Laura Downing and Al Mtenje examine not only these well-known features of Chichewa but also less well-studied phonological topics such as positional asymmetries in the distribution of segments, the phonetics of tone, and intonation. They survey important recent theoretical approaches to phonological problems such as focus prosody, reduplication, and vowel harmony, where Chichewa data is routinely referred to in the literature. The book will serve as a resource for all phonologists interested in these processes, regardless of their theoretical background, as well as Bantu scholars and linguists working on interface issues.

Dislocated Elements in Discourse

2009-01-13
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Dislocated Elements in Discourse

Author: Benjamin Shaer

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781134156344

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 486

View: 636

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This volume is about 'dislocation' – the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

The Phonology-Syntax Connection

1990-05-08
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
The Phonology-Syntax Connection

Author: Sharon Inkelas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 0226381005

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 462

View: 857

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This work deals with the insolvency both of companies and of individuals. Its publication coincides with the coming into force of the radical amendments to insolvency law contained within the Enterprise Bill 2002. The book should be suitable for those studying insolvency at undergraduate or postgraduate level, and for those studying for professional examinations and practising in the area.

Intonation in African Tone Languages

2017-01-01
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Intonation in African Tone Languages

Author: Laura J. Downing

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110503524

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 448

View: 947

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This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.

Focus Strategies in African Languages

2007-01-01
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Focus Strategies in African Languages

Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

ISBN: 9783110199093

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 330

View: 214

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Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies in African Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus. The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful typological generalization across languages. Their common aim is to deepen our understanding of whether and how the information-structural category of focus is represented and marked in natural language. Topics investigated are, among others, the relation of focus and prosody, the effects of information structure on word order, ex situ versus in situ strategies of focus marking, the inventory of focus marking devices, focus and related constructions, focus-sensitive particles. The present inquiry into the focus systems of African languages has repercussions on existing theories of focus. It reveals new focus strategies as well as fine-tuned focus distinctions that are not discussed in the theoretical literature, which is almost exclusively based on well-documented intonation languages.

Topic and Focus

2006-12-18
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Topic and Focus

Author: Chungmin Lee

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

ISBN: 9781402047961

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 294

View: 860

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During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.

Phonological Domains

2009-08-17
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Phonological Domains

Author: Janet Grijzenhout

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

ISBN: 9783110217100

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 365

View: 596

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This book puts together recent theoretical developments in prosodic phonology by leading specialists and presents language particular investigations on the morphosyntax-phonology interface by expert linguists working on diverse languages such as German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.

The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody

2018-10-29
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody

Author: Sun-Ah Jun

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9780429847240

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 255

View: 311

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First published in 1996. This book examines the phonetics and phonology of Korean prosody. Based on phonetic experiments, it proposes intonationally marked prosodic constituents above the word which condition various connected speech phenomena. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.