Call for contributions (booklet series): Languages of the World (fwd)

[Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong]

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Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 12:47:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Adelwisa A Weller <alagawel at umich.edu>
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Subject: Call for contributions (booklet series):  Languages of the World
    (fwd)

fyi.

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Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 12:28:37 -0500
From: Scott McGinnis <smcginnis at nflc.org>
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Subject: Call for contributions (booklet series):  Languages of the World

Call for Contributions
..............................................


Languages of the World (LW)

 Languages of the World is a booklet series for STUDIES
 ON GRAMMATICAL ISSUES; LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY;
 and the results of LINGUISTIC FIELD RESEARCH.

 The first ten issues have been published in journal form.
 From October 2000 on each issue focuses on a single
 topic (32 - 150pp), and is available as a separate
 booklet.

 Proposals should be sent to: Ulrich Lueders (ed.), LINCOM EUROPA,
 Freibadstr. 3, D-81543 Muenchen (FAX +49 89 62269404).

 The following issues are available now:

 LW12: A Conceptual Analysis of Tongan Spatial Nouns:
 From Grammar to Mind
 Giovanni Bennardo
 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In Churchward (1953) a set of Tongan nouns are labeled 'local', that is
"construed as if it were the proper name of a place" (p. 88). Some of
these nouns reappear under another label, that is, 'preposed' nouns (p.
214-16) and they are defined as nouns that can be "placed immediately
before
another noun instead of being connected with it by means of a
preposition"
(p.214).

This peculiarity was exploited by Broschart (1993) to argue for a
subset of these nouns to be considered as classifiers. In this work the
author
tries to clarify the border of this fuzzy subset of Tongan nouns
differently
addressed by Churchward and Broschard.

The analysis of this newly defined subset of Tongan nouns, 'spatial'
nouns, is conceptual, that is, based on a set of primitive (and
possibly universal) spatial concepts suggested by Lehman & Bennardo
(1992) and Bennardo (996). The conceptual apparatus is the result of
extensive analyses conducted on both English and Tongan spatial
prepositions. Further analyses regarded representations of spatial
relationships in other languages like Burmese, Thai and Italian.

Following Lucy's suggestion, grammatical features of the Tongan
language represent the path along which the conceptual analysis
moves. In fact, five structural contexts in which the 'spatial' nouns
appear represent the starting point of the analysis. The analysis will
weave through the grammatical and conceptual levels and will end up in
sorting the nouns into three separate groups according to a
combination of their conceptual content and grammatical
possibilities. Finally, the results of this analysis call for an
interesting modification of the conceptual apparatus.

 3 89586 917 1.
 Languages of the World 12.
 34pp. USD 9.50 / DM 17 / £ 5.60.

 LW13: The Lord's Prayer in Erromangan:
 Literacy and Translation in a Vanuatu Language
 Terry Crowley
 University of Waikato

Erromangan, an Oceanic language of southern Vanuatu, has a written
literature that until recently was restricted exclusively to materials
relating to recently introduced Christianity. This literature is
entirely translated, with the materials written by European
missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
many respects, these translations are structurally deviant to the
point where intelligibility is sometimes impaired.

Massive population loss and major language shift on the island in the
second half of the nineteenth century should has predisposed this
language to massive simplification and homogenisation in the direction
of English according to some scenarios, especially were literacy and
Christianisation are involved. However, the remaining Erromangan
language has remained vital, structurally complex and largely intact,
demonstrating that the linguistic disruption posed by
missionary-inspired literacy is nothing like as powerful as some have
suggested.

 ISBN 3 89586 973 2.
 Languages of the World 13.
 24 pp. USD 10 / DM 19 / £ 6.

 LW15: Ket Prosodic Phonology
 Edward J. Vajda
 Western Washington University

The present study proposes a complete inventory of the segmental and
suprasegmental phonemic units for the southern dialect of Ket, a
language isolate spoken in Central Siberia. It argues that Ket
contains a constrastive system of tones operating within the domain of
the phonological word rather than the syllable. This word tone system
consists of four tonemes, two of which have disyllabic and
monosyllabic allotones.

Tone in Ket serves to delimit one word from another by marking the
leftmost two syllables of each phonological word with one of four
contrastive combinations of melodic (height and contour) and
non-melodic features (vowel length and glottalization). In addition,
the four tonemes distinguish meaning by forming numerous minimal
pairs. The article describes Ket segmental phonology as containing
only 12 consonant and 7 vowel phonemes. Many constrasts which previous
researchers treated as phonemic (such as the difference between tense
vs. lax mid vowels and plosives vs. fricatives in word final position)
turn out to be allophonic when prosodic data are considered.

 3 89586 915 5.
 Languages of the World 15.
 36pp. USD 9.50 / DM 17 / £ 5.60.

 LW17: Reduplication in Tiriyó (Cariban)
 Sergio Meira
 Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik

This study presents original data illustrating previously undescribed
reduplicative patterns found in Tiriyó, a Cariban language spoken in
Northern Brazil; this is the first time that reduplication in a
Cariban language is described in detail. One of the patterns is
simpler, and its synchronic cases of variation suggest a certain path
of historical evolution. For the other pattern, the complexity of the
several subcases appear to indicate antiquity and make formal accounts
significantly more difficult.

 ISBN 3 89586 914 7.
 Languages of the World 17.
 26pp. USD 10 / DM 20 / £ 7

 LW18: Basic Word Order and Sentence Types in Kari'ña
 Andrés Romero-Figeroa
 Universidad de Oriente, Cumaná, Venezuela

The purpose of this research is to study the basic syntactic order in
Kari'ña through the analysis of an integrated corpus encopassing
simple sentences taken from conversations and texts ellicited from
natives. The fieldwork sessions for this work were carried out between
January and September of 1996 in Cachama, a village located in the
heart of the Kari'ña homeland in northeastern Venezuela.

This study covers the primary syntactic elements, i.e. Subject, Verb
and Object. As well, some consideration is given to other sentential
elements of this language - specially obliques and
adverbials. Finally, a survey of some sentence types in Kari'ña is
included. In general, the study pursues to determine the prevailing
syntactic order in Kari'ña, and to account for the most common
arrangements for quotative, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive,
copulative, imperative, interrogative and negative sentences.

 3 89586 686 5.
 Languages of the World 18.
 30pp. USD 11.00 / DM 20 / £ 6.50.

 LW20: The Loss of German in Upper Silesia after 1945
 Volkmar Engerer
 Statsbiblioteket Aarhus

In the first part of the study, an overview over Upper Silesia and the
numerous historical language shifts in this area is given. With at
least five language shifts and three phases of complete language loss,
Upper Silesia constitutes quite an illustrative case for loss and
maintenance in a region. In part two, a conceptualisation of language
shift is presented. Two approaches to language shift are then
developed, the processual and the correlative. The latter emphasises
the competence dimension, divided into an analysis of one language
only, German, and an analysis of languages as components of
multilingual profiles. Part three presents examples of analyses of
isolated German, using the correlative approach.

The results in both domains show that German is tied to an urban
milieu and has a dominant function as a professional language with
high prestige.  Part 4 demonstrates the use of multilingual profiles,
now from a processual perspective. The analyses show a clear
consolidation of Polish with an as yet undecided competition between
Upper Silesian and German as second languages. The tendency in the
direction of the trilingual profile German/Polish/Upper Silesian seems
to have a future if the domains of use stabilise.

 ISBN 3 89586 663 6.
 Languages of the World 20.
 Ca. 24pp. USD 9 / DM 18 / £ 6.

 In preparation:

 LW21: The properties of certain classes of indirect verbs and passives
 of state in modern Georgian
 Marcello Cherchi
 The University of Chicago

Indirect constructions in Georgian have been discussed with respect to
several types of verbs in the literature. When a particular
construction is identified as "indirect" (or "inverse"), the
investigator generally invokes a line of argumentation which relies
upon comparison with a putatively similar predicate or predicate type
in an Indo-European language. Our personal feeling is that for the
purposes of linguistic analysis it is more productive to view the
so-called "indirect" verbs as basic - rather than as derived -
structural types within Georgian grammar. However, in the present
paper paper we would like to avoid becoming enmeshed in that dispute
by starting from a different analytical perspective.

Specifically, we will attempt to delimit a class of verbs based on a
formal definition and examine the characteristics of the members of
that class. It will turn out that the majority of the verbs involved
have been clssified as "indirect" by one investigator or another, but
we would prefer to view that as a secondary, though certainly
interesting result. The more importantresult is the significance of
this sort of analysis for classification within the Georgian verbal
system. In particular, it supports posting a class that includes two
types of verbs which other investigators have generally partitioned
into two distinct classes.

 3 89586 919 8.
 Languages of the World 21.
 24pp. USD 9.50 / DM 17 / £ 5.60.

 LW24: A Priori Artificial Languages
 Alan Libert
 University of Newcastle

The best known artificial language is Esperanto. However, hundreds of
other artificial languages have been proposed, although some have not
progressed beyond the stage of sketches and few have seen much actual
use. Those which are not consciously based on natural languages are
called a priori languages. Such languages have been less successful
than artificial languages built with elements of natural languages,
such as Esperanto and Interlingua.

However, a priori languages are of considerable theoretical interest,
in particular from the point of view of language universals: if a
universal property holds even of languages created "from scratch",
then it can indeed be seen as a property of any (usable) human
language. Therefore, in the description of the grammars of several a
priori languages, particular attention will be given to whether their
features are in accord with proposed universals, of both the
Greenbergian and Chomskyan types.

After an introduction one chapter each will be devoted to
phonetics/phonology, writing systems, lexicon, morphology, syntax, and
semantics. The languages described include aUI, Babm, Fitusa,
Loglan/Lojban, and Suma. Most of these languages have received very
little attention, even from scholars studying artificial languages.

 ISBN 3 89586 667 9.
 Languages of the World 24.
 DM 68 / USD 44 / £ 25. 2001/I.