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Serial Verb Construction
The serial verb construction, also known as (verb) serialization or verb stacking, is a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a single clause.Tallerman, M. (1998). ''Understanding Syntax''. London: Arnold, pp.79–81. It is a common feature of many African, Asian and New Guinean languages. Serial verb constructions are often described as coding a single event;Aikhenvald, A. and Dixon, R.M.W. (2005). ''Serial Verb Constructions: A cross-linguistic typology''. Oxford: Oxford University PressLord, C. (1991). ''Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins they can also be used to indicate concurrent or causally-related events. Uses The terms "serial verbs", "serialization", etc. are used by different authors to denote somewhat different sets of constructions. There are also differences in how the constructions are analyzed, in terms of both syntax and semantics. In general, a structure described as a ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Etymology The word ''syntax'' comes from Ancient Greek roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering". Topics The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nupe Language
Nupe (also known as ''Anufe, Nupenci, Nyinfe, Tapa'') is a Volta–Niger language of the Nupoid branch primarily spoken by the Nupe people of the North Central region of Nigeria. Its geographical distribution stretches and maintains pre-eminence in Niger State as well as Kwara, Kogi, Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory. Demographics Nupe is the language spoken by the Nupe people, who reside mainly in Niger State in Nigeria, occupying a lowland of about 6,950 square miles (18,000 square kilometers) in the Niger Basin, mostly north of the river between the Kontagora and Guara confluents from Kainji to below Baro, and also Kwara State, Kogi State and the Federal Capital Territory. Nupe is spoken mainly in Bida, Niger State and surrounding areas. It is also spoken in villages on the Benue River The Benue River (french: la Bénoué), previously known as the Chadda River or Tchadda, is the major tributary of the Niger River. The river is approximately long and is almost ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfective
The perfective aspect (abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imperfective aspect, which presents an event as having internal structure (such as ongoing, continuous, or habitual actions). The term ''perfective'' should be distinguished from ''perfect'' (see below). The distinction between perfective and imperfective is more important in some languages than others. In Slavic languages, it is central to the verb system. In other languages such as German, the same form such as ''ich ging'' ("I went", "I was going") can be used perfectively or imperfectively without grammatical distinction. In other languages such as Latin, the distinction between perfective and imperfective is made only in the past tense (e.g., Latin ''veni'' "I came" vs. ''veniebam'' "I was coming", "I used to come"). However, perfective ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ewe Language
Ewe (''Eʋe'' or ''Eʋegbe'' ) is a language spoken by approximately 20 million people in West Africa, mainly in Ghana, Togo and Benin, and also in some other countries like Liberia and southwestern Nigeria. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called the Gbe languages. The other major Gbe language is Fon, which is mainly spoken in Benin. Like many African languages, Ewe is tonal as well as a possible member of the Niger-Congo family. The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages. Other linguists who have worked on Ewe and closely related languages include Gilbert Ansre (tone, syntax), Herbert Stahlke (morphology, tone), Nick Clements (tone, syntax), Roberto Pazzi (anthropology, lexicography), Felix K. Ameka (semantics, cognitive linguistics), Alan Stewart Duthie (semantics, phonetics), Hounkpati B. Capo (phonology, phonetics), Enoch Aboh (syntax), and Chris Collins (s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hindi Language
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been described as a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas of North India. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the two official languages of the Government of India, along with English. It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India. Hindi is the '' lingua franca'' of the Hindi Belt. It is also spoken, to a lesser extent, in other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginised variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi). Outside India, several ot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself. Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.) Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential. These are all finite forms of the verb. Infinitives, gerunds, and participles, which are non-finite forms of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Tense
In grammar, tense is a grammatical category, category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their grammatical conjugation, conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past tense, past, present tense, present, and future tense, future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and Nonfuture tense, nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Varieties of Chinese, Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and Nonfuture tense, nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the TUTT (linguistics), moment of s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Category
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include: * Tense, the placing of a verb in a time frame, which can take values such as present and past * Number, with values such as singular, plural, and sometimes dual, trial, paucal, uncountable or partitive, inclusive or exclusive * Gender, with values such as masculine, feminine and neuter * Noun classes, which are more general than just gender, and include additional classes like: animated, humane, plants, animals, things, and immaterial for concepts and verbal nouns/actions, sometimes as well shapes * Locative relations, which some languages would represent using grammatical cases or tenses, or by adding a possibly agglutinated lexeme such as a preposition, adjective, or particle. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lebanese Arabic
Lebanese Arabic ( ar, عَرَبِيّ لُبْنَانِيّ ; autonym: ), or simply Lebanese ( ar, لُبْنَانِيّ ; autonym: ), is a Varieties of Arabic, variety of North Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic. Due to multilingualism and pervasive diglossia among Lebanese people (a majority of the Lebanese people are bilingual or trilingual), it is not uncommon for Lebanese people to code-switch between or mix Lebanese Arabic, English language, English, and French language, French in their daily speech. It is also spoken among the Lebanese diaspora. Lebanese Arabic is a descendant of the Old Arabic, Arabic dialects introduced to the Levant in the 7th century AD, which gradually supplanted various indigenous Northwest Semitic languages to become the regional lingua franca. As a result of thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialectal Arabic
The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize (or distinguish) the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be different languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic. In terms of sociolinguistics, a major distinction exists between the formal standardized language, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baré Language
Barawana (Baré) is an Arawakan language of Venezuela and Brazil, where it is nearly extinct. It was spoken by the Baré people. Aikhenvald (1999) reports "just a few old speakers left" of Baré proper, and that the Guinau variety was extinct. Kaufman (1994) considers Baré proper, Guinau, and Marawá (currently extinct) to be distinct languages; Aikhenvald, dialects of a single languages. (Marawá is not the same language as Marawán.) ''Baré'' is a generic name for a number of Arawakan languages in the area, including Mandahuaca, Guarequena, Baniwa, and Piapoco Piapoco is an Arawakan language of Colombia and Venezuela. A "Ponares" language is inferred from surnames, and may have been Piapoco or Achagua. History Piapoco is a branch of the Arawak language, which also includes Achagua and Tariana. P .... Barawana is the language given this name in Kaufman, Aikhenvald, and ''Ethnologue''. It is also known as Ibini (a typo for Ihini ~ Arihini?) and Mitua. Phonology ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
