Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication – serie
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2 produkter
2 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2004
320 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar - an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow ""simple"" and even ""deficient.
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
442 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Saisiyat is a Formosan language spoken in the north-western part of Taiwan. It is divided into two groups, a northern and a southern group. The Northern group used to speak the Taai dialect (also known as the Northern dialect) and lives in the upper reaches of the Shangping river in Wufeng Township, Hsinchu County. It is now largely acculturated to the Atayal. The Southern group speaks the Tungho dialect, also referred to as the Southern dialect. Most of the population is distributed throughout the valley delineated by the Eastern and the Southern rivers in Nanchuang Township, Miaoli County and further divided into two major communities, Tungho and Penglai dispersed in a number of villages/settlements. A small amount of the population among the Southern group is also located in the upper reaches of the Shihtan River in Shihtan Township, Miaoli County and forms a third community, referred to as Shihtan. The major difference between the two dialects is said to lie in their phonologies but no study has so far attempted to determine the amount of lexical and morpho-syntactic variation.The goal of this monograph is to provide a functional and empirically-based study of the morphology of Tungho Saisiyat in an attempt to clarify the morphological units, morphological processes, major lexical categories of this language and further discuss its nominal and verbal morphology. The choice to orient this study towards morphology is explained by the fact that even though Saisiyat is now one of the best documented Formosan languages – there is one grammatical sketch and numerous studies on various aspects of Saisiyat grammar – there are still few studies on Saisiyat morphology, which level of complexity has been overlooked in the past.