The origins of language have long been the subject of myth and conjecture. Today, scientists and scholars are rendering these origins less obscure with clues from linguistic and archaeological evidence. Written by a panel of eminent linguists, this book guides the general reader through the mysterious and exciting world of languages and ...
This volume features over fifty of the world's languages and language families. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient ...
An introduction to the general linguistic study of aspect. Topics covered include the relation of tense and aspect, the morphology and the semantics of aspect, and structuralist and philosophical approaches. Dr Comrie draws his examples particularly from English and the Slavonic and Romance languages, but also from Arabic, Chinese, Welsh, Greek ...
Adopting an approach to the subject pioneered by Greenberg and others, Professor Comrie is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals. The book has chapters on word order, case marking, relative clauses and causative contruction and is informed throughout by the conviction that an explanatory account of universal properties of ...
A general account of the languages of the Soviet Union, one of the most diverse multinational and multilingual states in the world as well as one of the most important. There are some 130 languages spoken in the USSR, belonging to five main families and ranging from Russian, which is the first language of about 130,000,000 people, to Aluet, spoken ...
New in paperback, The Slavonic Languages provides chapter-length descriptions of each of the modern Slavonic languages and the attested extinct Slavonic languages. Individual chapters discuss the various alphabets that have been used to write Slavonic languages, in particular, Roman, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets; the relationship to one ...
Based on Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, this is the first guide in paperback to one of the major language families. The areas covered include Germanic languages, English, and Romance languages.
Bernard Comrie defines tense as the grammaticalisation of location in time. In this textbook he introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world, bringing together a rich collection of illustrative material that student and specialist alike will find invaluable. This systematic account of the ...
The increasingly syntactic approach to causatives has become an important element of modern linguistic thinking. This interest in the syntactic and semantic properties of causative constructions characterizes many of the papers collected in this volume.
Based on Bernard Comrie's much praisedThe World's Major Languages, this is the first guide in paperback to an important language family. The areas covered include Chinese, Japanese and Sino-Tibetan languages.
Part of a linguistic series covering all major world languages, this volume contains essays that describe the languages of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, including Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Swahili and Bantu, Yoruba and the Semitic languages.
In this scholarly volume, each of the living Slavonic languages are analysed and described in depth, together with the two extinct languages - Old Church Slavonic and Polabian. In addition, the various alphabets of the Slavonic languages - particularly Roman, Cyrillic and Glagolitic - are discussed, and the relationships of the Slavonic languages ...
Part of a linguistic series covering all major world languages, this volume contains essays that describe the languages of Eastern Europe, including Russian, Greek, Serbo-Croat, Czech and Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and other Indo-European, Uralic and Slavonic tongues.
The history of word class research is characterized by two extreme positions. Up to the 19th century, it was believed that word classes were invariably of the Latin or Greek type and universal. In contrast to that, in the 20th century, the view prevailed that every language had its own specific and unique word class system. In the last decades, ...
The concept of semantic roles has been central to linguistic theory for many decades. More specifically, the assumption of such representations as mediators in the correspondence between a linguistic form and its associated meaning has helped to address a number of critical issues related to grammatical phenomena. Furthermore, in addition to ...
Bernard Comrie and Gerald Stone's The Russian Language since the Revolution (OUP 1978) provided a comprehensive account of the way Russian changed in the period between 1917 and the 1970s. In this new volume the authors, joined by Maria Polinsky, extend the time frame back to 1900 and forward to glasnost in the mid 1980s. They first consider ...
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