Bücher der Reihe Publications in Linguistics (Sil and University of Texas)

This is the first comprehensive linguistic study of Bora, a typologically unusual language spoken in Colombia and Peru, the result of four decades of work among the Bora people. The language has an exceptionally high number of classifiers (over 300). These classifiers are used in various ways to carry out reference. By means of these classifiers, apposition is the primary mechanism for creating referring expressions, rather than the more cross-linguistically common mechanism of constituency. They also provide tight intersentential cohesion in discourse. The animate/inanimate distinction is pervasive, manifesting itself in the morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This volume also includes a thorough analysis of Bora grammatical and lexical tone, which has a complex system of sandhi with default tone being high, in contrast to the majority of tonal languages. The ethnographic sketch includes discussion of the unique Bora signal drums. This study will be of interest to all concerned with typological issues, South American languages and peoples, or tone studies.Wesley Thiesen received his B.A. in Anthropology from Wheaton College in 1948. He and his wife Eva worked for SIL among the Bora-speaking people from 1952 to retirement in 1998, living much of that time in a Bora village.David Weber received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1983. He and his wife Diana have worked with SIL since 1969. From 1972 to 2002 their efforts focused on the Huallaga Quechua language. He currently serves as an SIL linguistic consultant.The book''s cover depicts a basket handcrafted by the Bora people.

These two phonologies of the Chadic languages Muyang and Mbuko present typologically unusual data, the bulk of which is found in the vowel systems. Prosodies of labialization and palatalization can span entire words, affecting both vowels and consonants. Morphemes are of three types: neutral, labialized, and palatalized. At a deep level, these languages have only one or two basic vowels; all other vowel qualities result from the interplay of other factors. The labialization and palatalization prosodies do not operate identically, but may co-occur in Muyang, and possibly in Mbuko. The consonantal and tonal systems also have points of interest. Both Muyang and Mbuko have lateral fricatives, implosive stops and prenasalized voiced stops. Both have three tone levels but no contour tones or downstep. Voiced obstruents and voiced fricatives in Muyang and Mbuko are tonal depressors. These phonologies are written in a broadly generative rule-based framework, but theorists from various persuasions will find much of interest, including Muyang labialization patterns related to adjacency and consonant/prosody/vowel interactions, Mbuko tones and adjacency, and a Muyang [+cor] autosegment causative morpheme. The works in this volume are the result of years of intensive contact with the speakers of Muyang and Mbuko by the authors.

In this book the author presents an historical examination of sound change and other developments in the very-nearly extinct Gurage language known as Mesmes while also considering the linguistic and social environments in which the language has been lost. The study provides evidence for Mesmes linguistic relatedness with the other Gurage languages and with the Peripheral West Gurage subgroup in particular. The account also considers the impact of phenomena related to language loss and the linguistic effects of contact with Hadiyya, the language to which the Mesmes people have shifted today. The comparative work relies on previously published sources as well as unpublished fieldnotes and also provides the first fully annotated and interlinearized Mesmes text. This examination underscores that historical-comparative work may benefit from serious consideration of external, contact-related phenomena while at the same time not compromising a commitment to shared innovations as determined by the Comparative Method.

Presents 12 papers on coherence, participant reference, and Relevance Theory in Niger-Congo and Chadic languages of Cameroon. The papers are organized into three sections to explain the linguistic features of Niger-Congo and Chadic languages of Cameroon whose meaning can only be explained by taking into account domains larger than the sentence. Folk tales and other narratives are used to illustrate discourse features of 10 languages from Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Zaïre. The first section concentrates on how coherence is maintained in a text when the author introduces a local discontinuity. The second section identifies factors which affect the amount of encoding used as a speaker refers to participants throughout a discourse. The third section presents data that applies insights from Relevance Theory. Describes markers of prominence and backgrounding.