Papers From The First Annual Meeting Of The Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1991

The Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS) is a forum for linguists focusing on languages of mainland and Pacific Southeast Asia. The 2001 edition, Papers from the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, is a compilation of many of the papers presented at the meeting which was hosted by the Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University, Nakornpatom, Thailand from May 16-18, 2001. The conference featured three keynote speeches, eighty-seven paper presentations, and summation. About 150 scholars from more than 20 countries participated. All major language families of the region were represented at the conference and the papers focused on a wide range of linguistic topics.

The Routledge Language Family Series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, or those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development. With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area. It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time. Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists. ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University. JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars. YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.

This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as «cup» in «a cup of tea», classifiers such as «head» in «ten head of cattle», and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components - which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender - and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.