Visualizing Ability And Nominal Classification Evidence Of Cultural Operation In The Agreement Rules Of Japanese Numberal Classifiers

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

The book is about the numeral classifier system and the acquisition of Japanese classifiers by Japanese children. It consists of two parts. First, it provides a general typological characterization of numeral classifier phrases and discusses problems in determining what constitutes the nature of classifiers. It also discusses the semantic properties of numeral classifiers based on an analysis of four languages from four different language families. Second, it examines the acquisitions of Japanese numeral classifiers by Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on the development of comprehension. The importance of the study is that it reveals that young children have a much greater sensitivity to the conceptual underpinnings of the numeral classifier system than was previously considered to be the case. The research results also provide a converging source of evidence that young children often come to initially grasp the structure of the world in ways that are better understood in cognitive than perceptual terms. The implications will contribute to not only the area of language acquisition but also categorization and conceptual development.

The common aim of the contributions to this volume is to shed light on the communication of conceptual structures. The papers investigate how speakers rely on the same cognitive dispositions in three different areas of transfer: in the lexicalization of metonymies and metaphors; in intercultural communication; and in expert-lay communication.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of nominal plural marking, its morphosyntax and semantics, across different African varieties of English. Mohr explores the rich diversity in the varieties and how different conceptualizations of the number category are realized across different cultures. The investigation of unstandardized noun plurals in Kenyan, Tanzanian, Ghanaian and Nigerian Englishes is based on a mixed methods design drawing on corpus linguistics, acceptability questionnaires and psycholinguistic experiments. In this vein, the book not only contributes to the description of each of these four varieties, but also sheds light on standardization processes and language change in New Englishes. Importantly, it is a plea for the triangulation of data and mixed methods approaches in World Englishes research, as the combination of these methods grants insight into unforeseen areas of language structures and use. This volume is a useful reference work for students and researchers in World Englishes, varieties of English and African Studies, as well as those interested in linguistic anthropology.

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.