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6 books match the query 'Lexicology'

cover of Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman

Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Janis B. Nuckolls

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers.

This book is a fascinating look at ideophones—words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers’ discourse—both linguistic and cultural—because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena’s utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices.

Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.
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cover of Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States, 1930-1990

Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States, 1930-1990

Ellen Johnson

University of Alabama Press, 1996

This book discusses words used in the Southeast and how they have changed
during the 20th century. It also describes how the lexicon varies according
to the speaker's age, race, education, sex, and place of residence
(urban versus rural; coastal versus piedmont versus mountain). Data collected
in the 1930s as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic
States project were compared with data collected in 1990 from similar speakers
in the same communities.

The results show that region was the most important
factor in differentiating dialects in the 1930s but that it is the least
important element in the 1990s, with age, education, race, and age all
showing about the same influence on the use of vocabulary. An appendix
contains a tally of the responses given by 78 speakers to 150 questions
about vocabulary items, along with speakers' commentary. Results
from the 1930s may be compared to those from 1990, making this a treasure
trove for anyone interested in regional terms or in how our speech is changing
as the South moves from an agricultural economy through industrialization
and into the information age.




 
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cover of Lexical Matters

Lexical Matters

Edited by Ivan A. Sag and Anna Szabolcsi

CSLI, 1992

This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other componenets of grammer. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and the syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending nthe concpet of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linguistics at UCLA. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 24
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cover of Lexical Relations

Lexical Relations

Jean-Pierre Koenig

CSLI, 1999

The thrust of this book is to provide a model of lexical relations which reconciles the lexicon's idiosyncratic and productive aspects. Building on work in Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar, an organization of lexical knowledge is proposed--- called the Type Underspecified Hierarchical Lexicon--- through which partial regularities, medium-size generalization, and truly productive processes receive a unified model. Its basic thesis is that all lexical relations reduce to categorization (the membership of the two related lexemes in a common category) and that category intersection is the only mechanism needed to model lexical processes provided lexical items can be stored partially underspecified as to their category membership. Aside from the conceptual simplification that results from this move, the book demonstrates that several empirical and theoretical benefits accrue to this architecture; in particular, many salient properties of morphological processes are shown to reduce to inherent, formal properties of the organization of the lexicon.
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cover of Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon

Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon

Robert P. Malouf

CSLI, 2000

Mixed category constructions like the English verbal gerund involve words that seem to be central members of more that one part of speech. This poses a problem for the standard view of syntactic categories.

This book presents a novel analysis of this and similar mixed category constructions in languages including Quechua, Tibetan, Arabic, Fijian, Dagaare, and Jacaltec. Under this analysis, Robert P. Malouf shows that verbal gerunds share the selectional properties of verbs and the distributional properties of nouns. He further shows that since different dimensions of grammatical information can vary independently, the behavior of mixed categories creates no paradox. These dimensions are in principle independent. However, certain types of mixed categories are quite common in the world's languages, while others are rare or nonexistent. The book discusses how cross-linguistic variation can be accounted for by a lexical categorial prototype. By stating these prototypes as default constraints in a hierarchy of lexical information, Malouf argues that one can bring insights from cognitive and functional approaches to linguistics into a formal analysis, thus building on the strengths of both approaches.
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cover of The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships

The Calusa

Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships

Julian Granberry

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Presents a full phonological and morphological analysis of the total corpus of surviving Calusa language data left by a literate Spanish captive held by the Calusa from his early youth to adulthood

The linguistic origins of Native American cultures and the connections between these cultures as traced through language in prehistory remain vexing questions for scholars across multiple disciplines and interests.  Native American linguist Julian Granberry defines the Calusa language, formerly spoken in southwestern coastal Florida, and traces its connections to the Tunica language of northeast Louisiana.

Archaeologists, ethnologists, and linguists have long assumed that the Calusa language of southwest Florida was unrelated to any other Native American language. Linguistic data can offer a unique window into a culture’s organization over space and time; however, scholars believed the existing lexical data was insufficient and have not previously attempted to analyze or define Calusa from a linguistic perspective.

In The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships, Granberry presents a full phonological and morphological analysis of the total corpus of surviving Calusa language data left by a literate Spanish captive held by the Calusa from his early youth to adulthood. In addition to further defining the Calusa language, this book presents the hypothesis of language-based cultural connections between the Calusa people and other southeastern Native American cultures, specifically the Tunica. Evidence of such intercultural connections at the linguistic level has important implications for the ongoing study of life among prehistoric people in North America. Consequently, this thoroughly original and meticulously researched volume breaks new ground and will add new perspectives to the broader scholarly knowledge of ancient North American cultures and to debates about their relationships with one another.

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