Clusivity

This book presents a collection of papers on clusivity, a newly coined term for the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Clusivity is a widespread feature familiar from descriptive grammars and frequently figuring in typological schemes and diachronic scenarios. However, no comprehensive exploration of it has been available so far. This book is intended to make the first step towards a better understanding of the inclusive–exclusive opposition, by documenting the current linguistic knowledge on the topic. The issues discussed include the categorial and paradigmatic status of the opposition, its geographical distribution, realization in free vs bound pronouns, inclusive imperatives, clusivity in the 2nd person, honorific uses of the distinction, etc. These case studies are complemented by the analysis of the opposition in American Sign Language as opposed to spoken languages. In-depth areal and family surveys of clusivity consider this opposition in Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, central-western South American, Turkic languages, and in Mosetenan and Shuswap.

This work describes the grammar of Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ (Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀnéha:ˀ, Cayuga), an Ǫgwehǫ́weh (Iroquoian) language spoken at Six Nations, Ontario, Canada. Topics include Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀnéha:ˀ morphology (word formation); pronominal prefix selection, meaning, and pronunciation; syntax (fixed word order); and discourse (the effects of free word order and noun incorporation, and the use of particles). Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀnéha:ˀ morphophonology and sentence-level phonology are also described where relevant in the grammar. Finally, the work includes noun, verb, and particle dictionaries, organized according to the categories outlined in the grammatical description, as well as lists of cultural terms and phrases.

Taboo words, Quentin Tarantino’s films, humorous dialogues from “Sex and the City”, witty advertising slogans, the Bible, Barack Obama’s speeches, or legal discourse are only a few of the topics addressed in the volume. The study of discourse is a diversified and fast-developing field of language research, embracing methodological proposals, discourse analyses, comparative research, translation studies and teaching perspectives. Within each of the approaches, theoretical frameworks and postulates abound. The list of research topics is inexhaustible, especially that each year brings new real-life material subject to analysis and issues to elaborate. Each chapter is devoted to a different topic and deploys a separate theoretical framework. The diversity of research data, methodologies and theoretical viewpoints guarantees the volume’s being a representative sample of multifarious developments in discourse approaches. The book should thus be an interesting resource for enterprising researchers and students of linguistics.

Personal pronouns have a special status in languages. As indexical tools they are the means by which languages and persons intimately interface with each other within a particular social structure. Pronouns involve more than mere grammatical functions in live communication acts. They variously signal the gender of speakers as parts of utterances or in their anaphoric roles. They also prominently indicate with a range of degrees the kind of social relationships that hold between speakers from intimacy to indifference, from dominance to submission, and from solidarity to hostility. Languages greatly vary in the number of pronouns and other address terms they offer to their users with a distinct range of social values. Children learn their relative position in their family and in their society through the “correct” use of pronouns. When languages come into contact because of population migrations or through the process of translation, pronouns are the most sensitive zone of tension both psychologically and politically. This volume endeavours to probe the comparative pragmatics of pronominal systems as social processes in a representative set from different language families and cultural areas.

Features are a central concept in linguistic analysis. They are the basic building blocks of linguistic units, such as words. For many linguists they offer the most revealing way to explore the nature of language. Familiar features are Number (singular, plural, dual, ...), Person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and Tense (present, past, ...). Features have a major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorizing to the most applied computational applications, yet little is firmly established about their status. They are used, but are little discussed and poorly understood. In this unique work, Corbett brings together two lines of research: how features vary between languages and how they work. As a result, the book is of great value to the broad range of perspectives of those who are interested in language.

The strong development in research on grammatical number in recent years has created a need for a unified perspective. The different frameworks, the ramifications of the theoretical questions, and the diversity of phenomena across typological systems, make this a significant challenge. This book addresses the challenge with a series of in-depth analyses of number across a typologically diverse sample, unified by a common set of descriptive and analytic questions from a semantic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse perspective. Each case study is devoted to a single language, or in a few cases to a language group. They are written by specialists who can rely on first-hand data or on material of difficult access, and can place the phenomena in the context of the respective system. The studies are preceded and concluded by critical overviews which frame the discussion and identify the main results and open questions. With specialist chapters breaking new ground, this book will help number specialists relate their results to other theoretical and empirical domains, and it will provide a reliable guide to all linguists and other researchers interested in number.