Arabic-L:LING:New Book:Case in Semitic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 01 May 2013
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1) Subject:New Book:Case in Semitic

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1)
Date:01 May 2013
From:reposted from LINGUIST
Subject:New Book:Case in Semitic

Title: Case in Semitic
Subtitle: Roles, Relations, and Reconstruction
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics

Publication Year: 2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us


Book URL: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199671809.do


Author: Rebecca Hasselbach

Hardback: ISBN:  9780199671809 Pages: 384 Price: U.K. £ 65.00


Abstract:

This book sets out a new reconstruction for the Semitic case system. It is
based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and
relations in the attested Semitic languages and, for the first time, brings
typological methods to bear in the study of these features in Semitic
languages and their reconstruction for proto-Semitic. Professor Hasselbach
supports her argument with detailed analyses of a wide range of data and
presents it in a way that will be accessible to both Semitists and
typologists.

The volume is divided into seven chapters: the first discusses basic
methodologies used in Semitic linguistics and the limitations thereof. The
second presents the evidence for morphological case-marking in the
individual
Semitic languages, the conventional reconstruction of Proto-Semitic, and the
evidence which conflicts with it. The third introduces typological concepts
and methods and their deployment in Semitic. Chapter 4 considers the case
alignment of early Semitic. Chapter 5 presents a detailed study of marking
structures and patterns and considers what these reveal about the nature of
the original case system. Chapter 6 looks at the functions of case markers,
considers the light they cast on the nominal system, and shows that the
reconstruction of early Semitic as ergative is implausible. In the final
chapter the author argues that early Semitic had a different nominal system
from that of the later Semitic languages. She shows that the course of its
development has parallels in other Afroasiatic languages, including Berber
and
Cushitic. Her book sheds important new light on the history of the Semitic
languages and on the early development of the Afro-Asiatic language family
as
a whole.

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