Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign LanguageIn the sign languages of the deaf some signs can meaningfully point toward things or can be meaningfully placed in the space ahead of the signer. Such spatial uses of signs are an obligatory part of fluent grammatical signing. There is no parallel for this in vocally produced languages. This book focuses on American Sign Language to examine the grammatical and conceptual purposes served by these directional signs and demonstrates a remarkable integration of grammar and gesture in the service of constructing meaning.
This book shows that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike and furthermore that this unifying process goes back to Roman times, is accelerating, and affects every European language including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The unifying process involves every grammatical aspect of the languages and operates through changes so minute that native speakers fail to notice them.
The Indo-European language family consists of many of the modern and ancient languages of Europe, India and Central Asia, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. Spoken by an estimated three billion people, it has the largest number of native speakers in the world today. This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of the Indo-European languages.
The Grammar of Identity: Intensifiers and Reflexives in Germanic LanguagesAll major Germanic languages except Yiddish have intensifiers that have developed from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic form *selba-. For example, in English we have herself, in Icelandic there is sj´alfur and in Gothic - silba.
This book deals with the question of why intensifiers and reflexives are formally indistinguishable in so many languages of the world. Using evidence from germanic languages, this is a semasiological study on the family of self-forms in Germanic languages.
This collection of seven papers studies important aspects of the syntax of Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Rumanian from a comparative perspective based on current linguistic frameworks, including the Minimalist Program. Topics addressed include control, raising, and obviation, negation, noun phrase structure, clitic pronouns, and verb movement.
