Lessons from documented endangered languages / edited by K. David Harrison, David S. Rood, and Arienne Dwyer.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Harrison, K. David.

Rood, David S.

Dwyer, Arienne M.

Series:

Typological studies in language ; v. 78.

Typological studies in language ; 78

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Endangered languages.

Linguistics.

Physical Description:

vi, 375 p. : ill., map.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our common human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language, and is now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic facts­ - paradigms, affixes, vowel patterns­ - while pointing out the theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this, they reflect on the social and human dimensions, discussing particular problems of nostalgia and modernity, memory and forgetting, and obsolescence and ethics, while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.

Contents:

Prelim pages

Table of contents

A world of many voices: Editors' introduction

Sri Lanka Malay revisited: Genesis and classification

Working Together: The interface between researchers and the native people - The Trumai case

Tense, Aspect and Mood in Awetí verb-paradigms: Analytic and synthetic forms.

Tonogenesis in Southeastern Monguor.

Language, ritual and historical reconstruction: Towards a linguistic, ethnographical and archaeological account of Upper Xingu Society

Endangered Caucasian languages in Georgia: Linguistic parameters of language endangerment

Contact, attrition and shift in two Chaco languages: The cases of Tapiete and Vilela

Tofa language change and terminal generation speakers

Hocank's challenge to morphological theory

A Preliminary study of same-turn self-repair initiation in Wichita conversation

Multimedia analysis in documentation projects: Kinship, interrogatives and reciprocals in ǂ Akhoe Hai ǁ om

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612105418

9781282105416

1282105418

9789027290205

9027290202