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The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase

A Microparametric Account

Sandro Sessarego

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

In this important new study, Sandro Sessarego provides a syntactic description of the Afro-Bolivian Spanish determiner phrase. Afro-Bolivian Spanish is one of the many Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken across Latin America and, from a theoretical point of view, is rich in constructions that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish. Yet these constructions form the core grammar of these less-prestigious, but equally efficient, syntactic systems. Because of the wide variety of their usages, Sessarego’s study of these contact varieties is particularly valuable in developing and refining theories of syntactic microvariation.

This dialect presents phenomena that offer a real challenge to current linguistic theory. The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase elaborates on the importance of enhancing a stronger dialogue between formal generative theory and sociolinguistic methodology, in line with recent work in the field of minimalist syntax. Sessarego’s study combines sociolinguistic techniques of data collection with generative models of data analysis to obtain more fine-grained, empirically testable generalizations.

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The Allure of Grammar

The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry

Doug Rutledge, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Of Angie Estes, the poet and critic Stephanie Burt has written that she “has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world.” In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes’s work—from a review of her first chapbook to a reading of a poem appearing in her 2018 book, Parole—that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigor and genuine awe.

In addition to presenting an overview of critical reactions to Estes’s oeuvre, reviews by Langdon Hammer, Julianne Buchsbaum, and Christopher Spaide also provide a helpful context for approaching a poet who claims to distrust narrative. Original essays consider the craft of Estes’s poetry and offer literary analysis. Ahren Warner uses line breaks to explore a postmodern analysis of Estes’s work. Mark Irwin looks at her poetic structure. Lee Upton employs a feminist perspective to explore Estes’s use of italics, and B. K. Fischer looks at the way she uses dance as a poetic image. Doug Rutledge considers her relationship to Dante and to the literary tradition through her use of ekphrasis. An interview with Estes herself, in which she speaks of a poem as an “arranged place . . . where experience happens,” adds her perspective to the mix, at turns resonating with and challenging her critics.

The Allure of Grammar will be useful for teachers and students of creative writing interested in the craft of non-narrative poetry. Readers of contemporary poetry who already admire Estes will find this collection insightful, while those not yet familiar with her work will come away from these essays eager to seek out her books.

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American Sign Language Green Books, A Teacher's Resource Text on Grammar and Culture

Charlotte Baker-Shenk

Gallaudet University Press, 1991

This volume of the American Sign Language series explains in-depth the grammar and structure of American Sign Language (ASL) while also presenting a description of the Deaf community in the United States. Written for teachers with minimal training in linguistics, it includes many illustrations, examples, and dialogues that also focus on specific aspects of the Deaf community.

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Analyzing the Grammar of English

Third Edition

Richard V. Teschner and Eston E. Evans

Georgetown University Press, 2007

Analyzing the Grammar of English offers a descriptive analysis of the indispensable elements of English grammar. Designed to be covered in one semester, this textbook starts from scratch and takes nothing for granted beyond a reading and speaking knowledge of English. Extensively revised to function better in skills-building classes, it includes more interspersed exercises that promptly test what is taught, simplified and clarified explanations, greatly expanded and more diverse activities, and a new glossary of over 200 technical terms.

Analyzing the Grammar of English is the only English grammar to view the sentence as a strictly punctuational construct—anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, a question mark, an exclamation mark, or three dots—rather than a syntactic one, and to load, in consequence, all the necessary syntactic analysis onto the clause and its constituents.

It is also one of the very few English grammars to include—alongside multiple examples of canonical or "standard" language—occasional samples of stigmatized speech to illustrate grammar points.

Students and teachers in courses of English grammatical analysis, English teaching methods, TESOL methods, and developmental English will all benefit from this new edition.

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An Answer Key to 'A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin'

John R. Dunlap

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

The Arabic Linguistic Tradition

Georges Bohas, Jean-Patrick Guillaume, and Djamel Kouloughli. Foreword by Michael G. Carter

Georgetown University Press, 2006

Since The Arabic Linguistic Tradition was published in 1990, the field of Arabic linguistics has grown significantly. New journals, societies, and professional groups are flourishing as more contemporary linguists pursue the study of the Arabic language and its origins.

This book remains a touchstone in the field of Arabic linguistics. It is one of the first books to cover the whole range of language in Arabic culture and to offer a historical linguistic survey of the Arabic language from Classical to Modern Standard Arabic. The expert authors discuss pure grammatical theory as well as the context of language as it is used in religion, literature, law, and other disciplines.

The Arabic Linguistic Tradition presents a concise overview of the most important issues in theoretical and speculative linguistics in the Arabic tradition, from their origins in the eighth century through the codification of grammar in the tenth century to its decline in the fifteenth century. This volume represents the highest level of scholarship in English on phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic theory as they were developed by the major Arabic grammarians including Sibawayhi and al-Khalil ibn Ahmad.

Graduate students and scholars of Arabic linguistics and historical linguists will find this book to be a timeless classic.

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The Arapaho Language

Andrew Cowell

University Press of Colorado, 2015

The Arapaho Language is the definitive reference grammar of an endangered Algonquian language. Arapaho differs strikingly from other Algonquian languages, making it particularly relevant to the study of historical linguistics and the evolution of grammar. Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss Sr. document Arapaho's interesting features, including a pitch-based accent system with no exact Algonquian parallels, radical innovations in the verb system, and complex contrasts between affirmative and non-affirmative statements.

Cowell and Moss detail strategies used by speakers of this highly polysynthetic language to form complex words and illustrate how word formation interacts with information structure. They discuss word order and discourse-level features, treat the special features of formal discourse style and traditional narratives, and list gender-specific particles, which are widely used in conversation. Appendices include full sets of inflections for a variety of verbs.

Arapaho is spoken primarily in Wyoming, with a few speakers in Oklahoma. The corpus used in The Arapaho Language spans more than a century of documentation, including multiple speakers from Wyoming and Oklahoma, with emphasis on recent recordings from Wyoming. The book cites approximately 2,000 language examples drawn largely from natural discourse - either recorded spoken language or texts written by native speakers.

With The Arapaho Language, Cowell and Moss have produced a comprehensive document of a language that, in its departures from its nearest linguistic neighbors, sheds light on the evolution of grammar.

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Attitudes De Se

Linguistics, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Edited by Neil Feit and Alessandro Capone

CSLI, 2013

In English, we use the word "I" to express thoughts that we have about ourselves, and we use the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" to attribute such thoughts to others. Philosophers and linguists call such thoughts, and the statements we use to express them, de se.

De se thoughts and statements, although they appear often in our day-to-day lives, pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume examines the structure of de se thought, various issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of our discourse about it, and also what it reveals about how humans think about themselves and the world around them.

Contributors are:

Darren Bradley

Alessandro Capone

Eros Corazza

Wayne A. Davis

Denis Delfitto

Michael Devitt

Igor Douven

Neil Feit

Gaetano Fiorin

James Higginbotham

Yan Huang

Kasia M. Jaszczolt

Michael Nelson

Pietro Perconti

John Perry

Michael G. Titelbaum

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Attribute-Value Logic and the Theory of Grammar

Mark Johnson

CSLI, 1988

Because of the ease of their implementations, attribute-value nased theorires of grammar are becoming increasingly populaar in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts, as well as in computational linguistics. Mark Johnson provides a formal analysis of attribute-value structures, of their use in a theory of grammar, of the representation of grammatical relations in such theories of grammar, and the implications of different representations. A classical treatment of disjunction and negation is alo included. "Essential reading for anyone interested in recent unification-based approcahes to grammar. Johnson lucidly lays out a formal framework in which a sharp distinction is drawn between descriptions of linguistic objects and the objects themselves. Negation and disjuntion over complex features, though linguistically desirable, have given rise to many problems, and one of Johnson's main achievements is to show that they can be interpreted using classic logic." -Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh MARK JOHNSON is assitant professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University.

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