Nominal Classification In Asia And Oceania

Linguists have long been interested in systems of nominal classification due to their diverse functions as well as cognitive and cultural correlates. Among others, ongoing research has focused on semantic, functional and morphosyntactic properties of complex systems such as co-occurring gender and numeral classifiers. Such approaches have typically focused on the languages of north-western South America and Papua New Guinea. This volume proposes to fill in a gap in existing research by focusing on Asia, based on case studies from languages belonging to a wide range of families, i.e., Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Mongolic, Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai as well as the language isolate Nivkh. Gender and classifiers in these languages are approached within several different perspectives, i.e., functional, typological and diachronic, thus revealing complex patterns in their lexical and pragmatic functions as well as origin, development and loss. Describing and analysing such properties is a unique and innovative contribution of the volume.

A major linguistic study of nominal classification systems across a variety of languages, first published in 2000.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages, the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon, grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result, the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure, the diverse functions of grammatical categories, linguistic complexity, agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier, supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.

This text is the result of work discussed and presented at the Workshop on Classifier Constructions. It aims to bring to light issues related to the study of classifier constructions and to present contemporary linguistic and psycholinguistic analyses of these constructions.

This book features selected papers from the 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST 2018), held in Taipei, Taiwan. Covering the entire spectrum of fire safety science, it focuses on research on fires, explosions, combustion science, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, risk analysis and structural engineering, as well as other topics. Presenting advanced scientific insights, the book introduces and advances new ideas in all areas of fire safety science. As such it is a valuable resource for academic researchers, fire safety engineers, and regulators of fire, construction and safety authorities. Further it provides new ideas for more efficient fire protection.

Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings...). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.

Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology in some languages. This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, characteristics and functions in early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere, and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.