Bücher veröffentlicht von Sil International, Global Publishing

This book is designed as a textbook and is intended to present a sample of the more popular approaches to linguistic theorizing. It covers different aspects of each theory including general ontology, methodology, world view, and certain specifics including its problem-solving capacity regarding the English auxiliary complex. It gives a brief summary of the salient points of each theory and concludes with a brief treatment of concurrent developments in phonology. Included are discussions on: tagmemics, generative transformational grammar, stratificational linguistics, Montague grammar, generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar and functional approaches to grammar.

The study of evidentiality is in its relative infancy, and each new study in this largely unexplored area of linguistic structure reveals subtleties of grammatical and semantic behavior that give reason to reconsider and deepen analyses found in previous works. Evidentiality is usually discussed in terms of the kinds of justification a speaker has for making a particular assertion. When the author first began studying the Wanka Quechua language, he was immediately struck with the fact that the evidential system was not behaving as he had expected. Careful consideration of the individual markers revealed semantic nuances that are not usually found in other treatments on this topic. This volume provides a detailed look at the semantics of the evidential system of one Quechua language with implications for others. Parallels are noted with evidential systems of unrelated languages. The author analyzes the Wanka Quechua evidential system using a cognitive view of grammar and applies this approach to issues of semantics and category structure.

The temporal categories of tense and aspect have received much attention in linguistic literature. But often scholars concentrate on their grammatical description without regard to their function in discourse. This work is a comprehensive and systematic description of the function of tense and aspect in the Obolo language. The data for this study are ten texts, both written and oral, from the Ngo dialect of Obolo, which is spoken in southeastern coastal Nigeria. They represent the four main discourse genres of narrative, procedural, expository, and hortatory. In the model adopted for this work, the discussion of tense and aspect in the sentence correlates with the referential component, while the discussion of the discourse functions of tense and aspect correlates with the textual component.

Written in English and Spanish, this collection of tales presents a small sampling of the oral literature of the Zapotec people who live in the municipality of San Lorenzo Texmelucan, located southwest of Oaxaca City in the district of Sola de Vega, Mexico. In order to make the tales accessible to the Zapotec people, the original Zapotec is included using the practical orthography of the area. Thirteen folktales are presented, including one with a unique style in which a Zapotec poet communicates his worldview. In addition, one chapter is a collection of forty-six proverbs portraying Zapotec wisdom in short traditional expressions about life, vices, virtues, and human relationships. A cultural sketch highlights some of the patterns that characterize the people of San Lorenzo as a cultural unit.

The purpose of this study is to provide a generative and autosegmental phonological analysis of the Zaiwa language with emphasis on prosodic components. This is a preliminary phonology of Zaiwa with a relatively complete treatment of all phonological aspects, concentrating on suprasegmental components. The generative/autosegmental framework employed incorporates feature geometry in a manner that provides a view of the interaction of segmentals and suprasegmentals. In particular, the interaction of voice quality, tone, and consonantal features are presented using feature geometry and underspecification in order to differentiate lexical tone from derived tone. It is the author''s goal to provide a basis for understanding the processes occurring in Zaiwa phonology and provide helpful insights in understanding similar processes in other Tibeto-Burman languages.

David Foris gathered the data for this volume during the sixteen years he lived in the northwest part of Oaxaca in Mexico. He settled in the Chinantla, a Mexican term meaning ''an enclosed place'', a region boxed in by high mountain ridges and difficult to reach. Foris makes available the knowledge he has acquired about the fascinating Sochiapan Chinantec language. It is an isolated language that exhibits a complex system of verbal inflection. Speakers of the language can use more than thirty tone-stress distinctions to communicate messages in whistle speech with minimal ambiguity. The majority of words consist of a single syllable; there are a small number of two-syllable words and less than a dozen known tri-syllabics. This model-neutral presentation describes everything from the phonemes up through phrases and clauses to compound sentences; from the changes of tone and stress to changes in nucleus to signal a wide variety of tense, aspect, and related features. Regarding this book, Dr. Rudolph C. Troike, Head of the Department of English at the University of Arizona, says, "This is overall a masterful piece of work which makes a major contribution to Chinantec studies and to language typological research in general."

Lila Wistrand-Robinson, who is an Adjunct Professor of Social Studies at Black River Technical College in Pocohontas, Arkansas, has taken the data from her doctoral thesis on Cashibo, a Panoan language, and revised it for general readership. The research for this work was done over a six-year period during which Dr. Wistrand-Robinson made several trips to the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Azul ''Blue Ridge'' area of the Andes in Peru. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains many of the myths, legends, and chants passed from father to son among the Cashibo. For those readers who are particularly interested in how the stories relate to other Panoan languages, each tale has been linked with Thompson''s list of anthropological themes. Part two of the book describes the history of the Cashibo people and culture up to the mid 1960s. The references section includes not only those cited by the author in the volume, but also anthropological and linguistic works that discuss Panoan culture in general, and the Cashibo in particular. This section alone is a valuable resource for those interested in studying the languages and cultures of the indigenous groups living in the Peruvian rain forest.

When a workshop on logical connectives was first suggested, a leading linguist asked, "Are they really logical?" Logical relations between propositions were an elusive subject about which little research was available prior to that workshop held in 1989. Field method guides offered nothing for the analysis of signals that tell how a speaker intends for the listener to interpret and associate the propositions in a discourse. The articles in this volume discuss the indicators used by speakers and hearers in a wide range of languages to connect parts of discourse. The cues are sometimes related explicitly to lexical or syntactic features of the discourse; they are often linked to pragmatic aspects, the intended illocutionary effect, and at other times to the knowledge of the participants in the discourse. The goal of the authors is to assist the reader in reaching an understanding of how to determine what the speaker intends, how to identify the cues for the listener, and how to employ those cues.

The Cubeo people live principally along the Vaupés, Cuduyarí, and Querarí Rivers in the northwestern Amazon River Basin. Although the Cubeos have had contact with people outside their communities since the sixteenth century, their language and culture have remained largely intact. In this fifth volume in the series of Colombia language studies, the reader gains an overview of Cubeo phonology and morphophonemics, word classes, clause structure, and subordination. The text is richly supplemented with examples. The various affixes presented in the text are listed in the first appendix with their glosses and a reference to the sections in which the affixes are discussed. In the second appendix, the practical orthography is summarized. This grammar is especially interesting for linguists studying languages of the Tuconoan language family. The distinctive features of Cubeo grammar are the extensive system of classifiers for nouns and their modifiers, the evidential system for verbs indicating the source or validity of the information communicated, and a basic division of all verbs into two categories-stative and dynamic.

While many books have been written about basic literacy, few offer detailed information on how to plan and carry out a community literacy project. Fewer still give guidance in tackling the additional barriers of language, culture, and logistics in developing countries and in treating the local community as an active partner rather than a passive recipient in the literacy process. In Local Literacies: Theory and Practice, Glenys Waters includes these elements and presents a practical guide for developing a literacy program. Beginning with a discussion of the theories of learning and reading, the author provides a detailed description of how to plan and organize a literacy program when the practitioner has little to go on but wit, knowledge, and determination. With approximately one half of the book given to the development of instructional methods and materials in reading, writing, and basic math, Local Literacies will be especially helpul to those doing literacy work in linguistically diverse settings in much of the developing world. The reader will quickly discover that this is a book written by a person who has "been there and done that." Waters has spent more than twenty years in Australia and Papua New Guinea, both as a practitioner and a consultant in programs of literacy for adults and children. This personal experience, plus a thorough knowledge of the professional literature, make Local Literacies a "must" for the pioneering literacy worker.

Karen Daley leads the reader into what is perhaps the first discourse study of Vietnamese classifiers to date. After presenting a summary of classifiers and their funciton in languages of the world, she challenges the validity of regarding Vietnamese classifiers as simply fitting the prototypical pattern of phrase-level numeral classifiers. In Vietnamese several of the functions attributed to classifiers imply discourse relations, despite the prevailing assumption that their use is associated with the syntactic relations of phrases. A coherent pattern of classifier use becomes evident when they are observed in the larger syntactic environment of discourse. Daley uses discourse measurements of overall frequency, referential distance, and referential persistence and compares them with four criteria from a study of classifiers in White Hmong. The results in the present study indicate that the basic function of classifiers in Vietnamese discourse is referential-to mark salience.

The books in this series are analytical commentaries on the Greek text of New Testament books. Each book first identifies the high-level semantic components of the text and indicates the relationships between them. These components are then further analyzed to identify sub-components and their relationships. This process is continued until the basic units of communication, called propositions, are identified. These propositions are stated in semantically unskewed English glosses. Theme statements for paragraphs and larger units are derived from the analysis. A discussion of the evidence supporting the analysis is also given.

Cheyenne narratives exhibit all possible orders for the three major constituents of subject, object, and verb. In this book, the author explores factors that could possibly influence the order of major constituents in Cheyenne narrative. Through the analysis of texts elicited from Cheyenne speakers, she concludes that the newsworthy first principle provides an accounting for alternate constituent order and can be used to predict constituent order. Cheyenne, an Algonquian language, is spoken by Native Americans living in Montana and Oklahoma. The author has done language research with those in Montana since 1975. The theoretical basis of this study comes from her work toward earning a master''s degree at the University of Oregon.

The beat of an nkul, a wooden slit drum, reverberates at dawn around and through the trees and houses of the Ewondo people of Mekomba, Cameroon. What is being communicated? The author''s interest was sparked in this communication phenomenon when he recorded audio versions of a drummed message. Though the general message was the same for each performance, the differences were strikingly noticeable. It was apparent that this was not a recital of a fixed piece. He wondered how many different ways a text could be drummed and still be understood, and how exact was the correlation between speech sounds and drum strokes. By examining in detail the performance paradigm of Antoine Owono, a church leader who has been drumming for more than forty years, Paul Neeley presents a thorough analysis of this communication event. The analysis ranges from phonology of drumstrokes, to the discourse level, to the level of community comprehension. This study draws from such diverse disciplines as sociolinguistics, anthropology, semiotics, cognition, aesthetics, and ethnomusicology to make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of African culture and communication.

The social patterns that constrain behavior in each language group in Irian Jaya define both what holds the culture together internally and what protects it against dismemberment from the outside. As happens with the people of other countries, the people of these varied indigenous cultures face mounting contact with representatives of the country''s major culture. Any attempt to understand their chances of cultural survival or adaptation must be based on an understanding of the social fabric that provides cohesion for each culture. The articles contained in this volume reveal the way the people cope with the forces that present both tension and stability as an essential part of their social fabric.

The books in this series are analytical commentaries on the Greek text of New Testament books. Each book first identifies the high-level semantic components of the text and indicates the relationships between them. These components are then further analyzed to identify sub-components and their relationships. This process is continued until the basic units of communication, called propositions, are identified. These propositions are stated in semantically unskewed English glosses. Theme statements for paragraphs and larger units are derived from the analysis. A discussion of the evidence supporting the analysis is also given.

Twenty-two papers selected from a 1993 Seminar in Dallas, attended by a combination of professional Bible translators, biblical scholars and discourse linguists, are divided into three parts: Grammatical, Syntactical and Accent Studies; Narrative Genre; and Topics Related to Nonnarratives Genres. There is an introductory essay by C.H.J. van der Merwe which will help non-specialists. The authors are translation personnel and consultants from SIL International and the United Bible Societies, as well as scholars from Denmark, Sweden, Holland, South Africa, Israel, and the United States. Shares interaction of linguists and biblical scholars to provide exciting insights into the understanding of biblical texts.

Stress plays an important role in the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Mamainde. The author uses the current theories of metrical and lexical phonology to analyze this stress system. It is demonstrated that a typical application of metrical rules alone will not predict stress correctly. Instead, Mamainde must make use of multiple strata in order for stress placement to be predicted.

Contains a selection of folktales collected in Vietnam from 1960 to 1975.

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.