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Mekong-Mamberamo Linguistic Area
The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area is a linguistic area proposed by David Gil (2015).Gil, David. 2015. âThe Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area?€™ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. ''Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art''. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. It combines the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area with the languages of the Nusantara archipelago and western New Guinea. The linguistic area covers Mainland Southeast Asia, Malaysia (including both peninsular Malaysia and Borneo), and all of Indonesia except for the parts of central New Guinea that are located east of the Mamberamo River. Features Gil (2015:271) lists 17 features that are characteristic of the Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area. #passing gesture #repeated dental clicks expressing amazement #conventionalized greeting with ‘where’ #‘eye day’ > ‘sun’ lexicalization #d/t place-of-articulation asymmetry # numeral classifiers # verby adjectives #basic SVO word order #iamitive perfects ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Area
A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The languages may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Because of this, attempts to classify some language families without knowledge about the history of the languages can lead to misclassification as sprachbunds and similarly some sprachbunds are incorrectly classified as language families. History In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship (''rodstvo'') and those arising from co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Numeral Classifier
A classifier (abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an important role in certain languages, especially East Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Classifiers are absent or marginal in European languages. An example of a possible classifier in English is ''piece'' in phrases like "three pieces of paper". In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted, that is, when it appears with a numeral. In such languages, a phrase such as "three people" is often required to be expressed as "three ''X'' (of) people", where ''X'' is a classifier appropriate to the noun for "people". Classifiers sometimes have other functions too; in Chinese, they are commonly used when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative (word meaning "this" or "that"). Chin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Southeast Asia
There have been various classification schemes for Languages of Asia#Southeast Asian languages, Southeast Asian languages (see the articles for the respective language families). Language families The five established major language families are: *Kra–Dai languages, Kra–Dai *Austronesian languages, Austronesian *Austroasiatic languages, Austroasiatic *Hmong–Mien languages, Hmong–Mien *Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan Isolates and small families A number of language groups in Arunachal Pradesh traditionally considered to be Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman languages, Tibeto-Burman) may in fact constitute independent language families or isolates (Roger Blench 2011). (See Language isolates and independent language families in Arunachal.) *Potential language isolates and independent language families in Arunachal: Digaro languages, Digaro, Hrusish languages, Hrusish (including the Miji languagesBlench, Roger. 2015''The Mijiic languages: distribution, dia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tense–aspect–mood
Tense–aspect–mood (commonly abbreviated ) or tense–modality–aspect (abbreviated as ) is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different languages. TAM covers the expression of three major components of words which lead to or assist in the correct understanding of the speaker's meaning: * Tense—the position of the state or action in time, that is, whether it is in the past, present or future. * Aspect—the extension of the state or action in time, that is, whether it is unitary (perfective), continuous or repeated (imperfective). * Mood or Modality—the reality of the state or action, that is, whether it is actual (realis), a possibility or a necessity (irrealis). For example, in English the word "walk" would be used in different ways for the different combinations of TAM: * Tense: He walked (past), He walks (present), He will walk (future). * Aspect: He walked (uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thematic Relation
In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", ''Susan'' is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; ''an apple'' is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient. Since their introduction in the mid 1960s by Jeffrey Gruber and Charles Fillmore, semantic roles have been a core linguistic concept and ground of debate between linguist approaches, because of their potential in explaining the relationship between syntax and semantics (also known as the syntax-semantics interface), that is how meaning affects the surface syntactic codification of language. The notion of semantic roles play a central role especially in functionalist and language-comparative ( typological) theories of language and grammar. While most modern linguistic theories ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function Word
In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences. Words that are not function words are called ''content words'' (or open class words, ''lexical words,'' or ''autosemantic words'') and include nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs although some adverbs are function words (like ''then'' and ''why''). Dictionaries define the specific meanings of content words but can describe only the general usages of function words. By contrast, grammars describe the use of function words in detail but treat lexical words only in general terms. Since it was first proposed in 1952 by C. C. Fries, the distinguis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isolating Language
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Igbo in West Africa and Vietnamese (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia. A closely related concept is that of an analytic language, which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified. However, analytic languages such as English may still contain polymorphemic words in part because of the presence of derivational morphemes. Isolating languages contrast with synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined. Explanation Although historically ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs and receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis. The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ''ate'' is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form ''was eaten'' is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, ''the cat'' is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences. # ''The cat ate the mouse.'' # ''The mouse was eaten by the cat.'' In a transformation from an active-voice clause to a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adnomination
Adnomination is the repetition of words with the same root word A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the prima .... Example References {{Poetry-stub Poetic devices ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Causative
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or ''lexical'' causative forms (such as English ''rise'' → ''raise'', ''lie'' → ''lay'', ''sit'' → ''set''). Some languages also have morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of ''becoming''. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verbal Adjective
An attributive verb is a verb that modifies (expresses an attribute of) a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate. In English (and in most European languages), verb forms that can be used attributively are typically non-finite forms — participles and infinitives — as well as certain verb-derived words that function as ordinary adjectives. All words of these types may be called verbal adjectives, although those of the latter type (those that behave grammatically like ordinary adjectives, with no verb-like features) may be distinguished as deverbal adjectives. An example of a verbal adjective with verb-like features is the word ''wearing'' in the sentence ''The man wearing a hat is my father'' (it behaves as a verb in taking an object, ''a hat'', although the resulting phrase ''wearing a hat'' functions like an attributive adjective in modifying ''man''). An example of a deverbal adjective is the word ''interesting'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
