James W. Gair – författare

This volume collects twenty-nine published and unpublished papers by the linguist James Gair, considered the foremost western scholar of the Sri Lankan languages Sinhala and Jaffna Tamil. Ranging over thirty years, his work also considers issues in a variety of Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali. The collection reflects the wide range of Gair's interests, from morpho-syntactic questions to questions regarding historical and areal linguistics, especially language contact and diglossia, and extending to language acquisition. By collecting these papers and making them newly accessible, this volume will provide an important resource not only for scholars of these languages but for linguists interested in the theoretical issues Gair explores.

How does a biologically-programmed language faculty interact with language experience in the acquisition of language across the world? Bringing together linguistic theory, language typology, and cross-linguistic experimental results from parallel studies of development in language acquisition, this book reports new research on the nature of the human competence for language acquisition. It investigates the acquisition of complex sentence formation through relativization -a fundamental component of language knowledge- through systematic, formally explicit, hypothesis-driven experimental studies from English, French and Tulu (in the US, Belgium and India). It demonstrates that across languages, the course of acquisition shares basic properties in keeping with universals of a language faculty, while at the same time, in all languages, specific relativization forms are achieved through development. The results show the power of an approach to the study of language acquisition which bridges linguistic theory of Universal Grammar with real-time creation of a specific language by the child.

No detailed description available for "Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages:".

Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research.

The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. The distinctive feature of the series is its markedly empirical orientation. All conclusions to be reached are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. General problems are focused on from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of phenomena from little known languages, which shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

The series is open to contributions from different theoretical persuasions. It thus reflects the methodological pluralism that characterizes the present situation. Care is taken that all volumes be accessible to every linguist and, moreover, to every reader specializing in some domain related to human language.

A deeper understanding of human language in general, based on a detailed analysis of typological diversity among individual languages, is fundamental for many sciences, not only for linguists. Therefore, this series has proven to be indispensable in every research library, be it public or private, which has a specialization in language and the language sciences.

To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

No detailed description available for "e;Colloquial Sinhalese Clause Structures"e;.