A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphemes expressing spatial relationships that discusses the relationship between the way human beings experience space and the way it is encoded grammatically in language. The discussion of the similarities and differences among languages in the encoding and expression of spatial relations centers around the emergence and evolution of spatial grams, and the semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics of two types of spatial grams. The author bases her observations on the study of data from 26 genetically unrelated and randomly selected languages.
This volume grew out of the Seventeenth Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium, which was held in Milwaukee on April 8-10, 1988. The theme of the conference was the relationship between linguistics and literacy. In this volume, a selection of papers are presented which cluster around three of the major themes that developed during the conference: the linguistic differences between written and spoken genres, the relationship between orthographic systems and phonology, and the psychology of orthography.
This volume, originally published in Russian, combines data from a wide range of languages, meticulously analyzed, with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus capable of isolating the most important syntactic and semantic parameters and of drawing those generalizations that are most significant from a cross-linguistic perspective. Many ideas which are at best only hinted at in earlier literature – such as the precise relation among resultative, perfect, and stative, or correlations between resultative and passive voice – are here for the first time stated precisely and given a firm foundation by means of detailed exemplification from a wide range of languages.
This collection aims first to establish a structure-independent, language-independent definition of pragmatic voice, and more specifically then a universal functional definition of “inverse”. The grammar and pragmatic function of the four major voice constructions — direct-active, inverse, passive, antipassive — are surveyed using narrative texts from 14 languages: Koyukon (Athabascan), Plains Cree (Algonquian), Chepang (Tibeto-Burman), Squamish and Bella Coola (Salish), Sahaptin (Sahaptian), Kutenai (isolate), Surinam Carib (Carib), Spanish and Greek (Indo-European), Korean, Maasai (Nilotic), Cebuano and Karao (Philippine).
The volume's central concern is grammatical voice, traditionally known as diathesis, and its classical manifestations as Active, Middle, and Passive. While numerous problems in the meaning, syntax, and morphology of these categories in Indo-European remain unsolved, their counterparts in more exotic languages have raised still further questions. What discourse functions and diachronic events unite 'voice' as a recognizable phenomenon across languages? How are they typically grammaticalized? What stages do children go through in learning them? How does 'voice' link up with ergativity and with other categories and constructions such as the Inverse and the Antipassive?
