Overview

This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our common human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language, and is now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic facts­ - paradigms, affixes, vowel patterns­ - while pointing out the theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this, they reflect on the social and human dimensions, discussing particular problems of nostalgia and modernity, memory and forgetting, and obsolescence and ethics, while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.

Full Product Details

Author:   K. David Harrison (Swarthmore College) ,  David S. Rood (University of Colorado) ,  Arienne Dwyer (University of Kansas)
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Volume:   78
Weight:   0.825kg
ISBN:  

9789027229908

ISBN 10:   9027229902
Pages:   375
Publication Date:   11 September 2008
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

1. A world of many voices: Editors' introduction (by Harrison, K. David); 2. Sri Lanka Malay revisited: Genesis and classification (by Ansaldo, Umberto); 3. Working Together: The interface between researchers and the native people - The Trumai case (by Becquelin, Aurore Monod); 4. Tense, Aspect and Mood in Aweti verb-paradigms: Analytic and synthetic forms. (by Drude, Sebastian); 5. Tonogenesis in Southeastern Monguor. (by Dwyer, Arienne); 6. Language, ritual and historical reconstruction: Towards a linguistic, ethnographical and archaeological account of Upper Xingu Society (by Fausto, Carlos); 7. Endangered Caucasian languages in Georgia: Linguistic parameters of language endangerment (by Gippert, Jost); 8. Contact, attrition and shift in two Chaco languages: The cases of Tapiete and Vilela (by Golluscio, Lucia A.); 9. Tofa language change and terminal generation speakers (by Harrison, K. David); 10. Hocank's challenge to morphological theory (by Helmbrecht, Johannes); 11. A Preliminary study of same-turn self-repair initiation in Wichita conversation (by Mirzayan, Armik); 12. Multimedia analysis in documentation projects: Kinship, interrogatives and reciprocals in Akhoe Hai om (by Widlok, Thomas); 13. Index

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