Thomas E. Payne – författare

This book is a unique collection of papers on the languages and cultures in the northern areas of Pakistan and the surrounding regions. In a single volume, the editors have compiled the work of a variety of national and international scholars, long concerned with the linguistic aspects of the many languages discussed here. The basis for most of the articles is material collected in areas difficult to access, presented here in print for the first time. The material sometimes concerns languages likely to soon disappear. The different chapters reflect many of the complex regions and languages of northern Pakistan and its surrounding areas, thus being of interest to linguistic scholars across the world. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Carla Radloff, who was a well-known contributor to studies of the languages of northern Pakistan until her untimely death in 2012.

This work is a quantitative discourse study of referential devices in Yagua, a relatively unstudied language of the Amazon basin. Of particular interest are folktales in which the major participants are matched pairs, and which involve extensive use of direct speech. A major finding is that the indices of "Referential Distance" and "Persistence" quantify distinct functional domains.

Current estimates are that around 3,000 of the 6,000 languages now spoken may become extinct during the next century. Some 4,000 of these existing languages have never been described, or described only inadequately. This book is a guide for linguistic fieldworkers who wish to write a description of the morphology and syntax of one of these many under-documented languages. It uses examples from many languages both well known and virtually unknown; it offers readers one possible outline for a grammatical description, with many questions designed to help them address the key topics. The appendices offer guidance on text and elicited data, and on sample reference grammars which readers might wish to consult.

Language is primarily a tool for communication, yet many textbooks still treat English grammar as simply a set of rules and facts to be memorised by rote. This new textbook is made for students who are frustrated with this approach and would like instead to understand grammar and how it works. Why are there two future tenses in English? What are auxiliaries and why are they so confusing? Why are English motion verbs hard to use? Why are determiners so important in English? These and many other frequently asked questions are answered in this handy guide. Student learning is supported with numerous exercises, chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading. An accompanying website offers further resources, including additional classroom exercises and a chance to interact with the author. It is the essential grammar toolkit for students of English language and linguistics and future teachers of English as a Second Language.

Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China. This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language.

Panare, also known as E'ñapa Woromaipu, is a seriously endangered Cariban language spoken by about 3,500 people in Central Venezuela. A Typological Grammar of Panare by Thomas E. Payne and Doris L. Payne, is a full length linguistic grammar written from a modern functional and typological perspective. The many remarkable characteristics highlighted in the grammar include a 'split-inverse' person marking system, transitivity-sensitive aspect and person-marking verb morphology, object incorporation, relatively nonconfigurational NP structure, both verb-initial and object-initial constituent orders, a complex system of clause chaining, switch reference, and a rich system of evidential and epistemic marking.