A grammar of Nakkara (Central Arnhem Land coast)

Bronwyn Eather
Appen Butler Hill Inc.

RMW Dixon (series ed.)

Nakkara (now spelt Na-Kara) is a prefixing language of the non-Pama Nyungan variety spoken in and around the community of Maningrida in the Northern Territory of Australia. Like many coastal communities, the Na-Kara tribal area and language group seem always to have been quite small and Na-Kara is now a highly endangered language.

Moderately polysynthetic, Na-Kara has a number of characteristic structural features that place it with other central and western Arnhem groupings. The phonology is relatively straightforward with five vowels; a series of short and long stop consonants; retroflex and alveolar pairs, a lamino-palatal distinction and a full set of nasal sounds.

The morphology is rich and intricate springing from a pronoun system that distinguishes masculine and feminine gender across several number and person categories where an inclusive/exclusive distinction adds to the mix. Verbs carry these often complex pronominal prefixes as well as additional affixes for direction, realis/irrealis, tense and transitivity. Aspect is expressed by complex verbal predicates. Nouns are relatively unencumbered with affixes but share some of the load for locational specification. Demonstrative/deictic forms carry a quasi pronominal load often with three-way locational and referential distinctions.

With a fairly modest lexicon, many forms in Na-Kara are idiomatic and descriptive, relying on compounding for semantic extension.

Outstanding grammars from Australia 07. 504pp. 2011.

ISBN 9783862881536 (print).

ISBN 9783862887644 (e-book, graphic pdf).

Topics in Eastern and Central Arrernte Grammar

John Henderson
University of Western Australia

RMW Dixon (series ed.)

Eastern/Central Arrernte is a range of closely-related dialects spoken in an area around and including Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. It can be considered one of the strongest Australian Indigenous languages, with an estimated 2,000 speakers and continuing transmission to children. Nonetheless, Arrernte is under pressure and must be considered endangered.

There are four areas of particular focus in this work. The focus on segmental phonology reviews and extends modern analyses of the vowel system, and in the consonant system presents instrumental articulatory evidence on the contrast between alveolar and post-alveolar phonological categories. Three fundamental aspects of the morphological structure are presented, primarily in relation to verbs. A range of complex verb types is distinguished, including an analysis of variation in which a single verb may alternatively constitute either a single word or more than one word. Prosodic units are shown to play an important role in a rich variety of morphological processes which include suffix allomorphy, reduplication, compounding and verb splitting. The final area of focus is verbal and deverbal derivation. The approach throughout is basically descriptive. Numerous natural language examples are provided.
 

Outstanding grammars from Australia 12. 450pp. 2013.

ISBN 9783862884261 (print).

ISBN 9783862887682 (e-book, pdf).

Kisangani Swahili

Choices and Variation in a Multilingual Urban Space

Nico Nassenstein

University of Cologne

The emergence of complex language practices in multilingual settings of urban Africa and the study of speakers’ broad linguistic repertoires have increasingly moved into the academic focus of linguists over the past couple of years. Kisangani Swahili constitutes a fluid urban practice spoken in the convergence area of Lingala and Swahili in the city of Kisangani, but also throughout Tshopo District (Province Orientale, DR Congo) by more than a million people. Swahili as spoken in Kisangani has developed into a variety marked by speakers’ linguistic choices, indexing speakers’ potential underlying knowledge of Lingala and French. While the influence from French has mainly affected Kisangani Swahili at a lexical level, Lingala and to a minor extent also non-Bantu languages such as Zande have significantly contributed to morphosyntactic variation in the variety. The complementary geographical distribution of the two languages, Lingala and Swahili, in different neighborhoods of the same city, has led to fluid phonological, morphological and syntactic pools of choices in today’s Swahili that display speakers’ ideological concepts of self-revelation and orientation.

The present grammar of Kisangani Swahili can be considered the first grammatical description of this urban variety, focusing predominantly on language convergence, metatypy and irregularity in language, analyzed from a variationist sociolinguistic angle, and pursuing an emic approach in the documentation of Swahili. Phenomena such as conscious structural adaptability toward either ‘standardized’ Swahili or Lingala and calquing as strategies of linguistic agency are particularly dealt with in the present sketch, marking speakers’ linguistic identity. Besides the sociolinguistic setting, the phonological inventory and morphosyntactic structure of the language, a pragmatic analysis as well as a selection of texts and a word list conclude the description of this urban Congo Swahili regiolect.

Languages of the World/Materials 506. 261pp. 2015.

ISBN 9783862886678 (print).

ISBN 9783862887859 (e-book, pdf).

Sprache(n) und Musik

Akten der gleichnamigen Sektion auf dem XXXI. Romanistentag (Bonn, 27.09.-01.10.2009)

Anja Overbeck / Matthias Heinz (Hrsg.)

Sprache und Musik fordern als Zeichensysteme mit vielfachen Bezügen aufeinander einen pluri- und interdisziplinären Forschungszugang geradezu heraus. Die Akten zur Sektion «Musik und Sprache(n)» des XXXI. Romanistentages in Bonn entsprechen dem – ganz im Sinne der von Anfang an «transversalen» Ausrichtung des Tagungsprogramms. In insgesamt 18 Beiträgen zeigt sich eine breite thematische Auffächerung, die wichtige aktuelle Forschungsfragen spiegelt: Mehrere primär linguistisch und teils empirisch orientierte Beiträge rezipieren etwa die besonders in (Musik-) Semiotik und Kognitionswissenschaft rege Forschung zum Interagieren beider Ausdrucksformen. In weiteren Beiträgen werden einerseits übergreifende Themen der europäischen Sprach-, Musik- und Kulturgeschichte mit Anwendungsbeispielen kombiniert, andererseits Parallelen literarischer und musikalischer Ausdrucksformen in Autoren-, Werk- und Gattungsperspektive diskutiert. Dadurch werden Schnittstellen und Schnittmengen zwischen den Einzeldisziplinen sichtbar gemacht und transdisziplinäre Erschließungsmechanismen für die Phänomenbereiche Sprache und Musik herausgearbeitet.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Vorwort
Matthias Heinz (Tübingen/Köln) / Anja Overbeck (Göttingen)

Sprache und Musik: Zeichentypen und ihre Konsequenzen [1]
Manfred Bierwisch (Berlin)

Über die Singbarkeit der Sprachen [2]
Harro Stammerjohann (Frankfurt a.M.)

Sprache und Musik: Zur Analyse gesungener Sprachen anhand von Opernarien [3]
Elmar Schafroth (Düsseldorf)

Guglielmo Tell und Les Noces du Figaro: Einzelsprachliche Prosodie und Textvertonung in der italienischen und französischen Oper [4]
Christoph Gabriel (Hamburg)

Zur Pragmatik der affektiv-prosodischen Markierungen im fado de Lisboa [5]
Steffen Thomas Buch (Göttingen)

Sprachliche Alternanzen in Liedtexten [6]
Christina Märzhäuser (München)

Überlegungen zur diskursiven Repräsentation des Französischen in Kanada am Beispiel von Texten frankophonen Raps aus Québec [7]
Julia Kuhn (Jena)

Tra musicologia, linguistica dei corpora e informatica: il Lessico della letteratura musicale italiana 1490-1950 (LesMu) [8]
Fabio Rossi (Messina)

Musikterminologie in der romanischen Lexikographie [9]
Frank Paulikat (Augsburg)

Die Konzeptualisierung von Tonhöhe – eine diachrone Analyse [10]
Anke Grutschus (Köln)

Zur Konfliktualität von Nationalhymnentexten als kollektiven Identifikationssymbolen:
Frankreich, Spanien und Katalonien im Vergleich [11]
Carlos Collado Seidel (München)

Zwischen Lorbeer und Scheiterhaufen. Zur Inszenierung von Sterbe-und Todesszenen in der politischen Oper Italiens [12]
Annette Frank (Wien)

Frauenbilder in populärer Musik der Karibik – Zwischen Verehrung und Verachtung [13]
Kristina Bedijs (Hildesheim)

Wer «azzurro» singt, meint nicht einfach blau: Überlegungen zur Farbsemantik im italienischen Lied  [14]
Christoph Oliver Mayer (Dresden)

Von der Lyra zur Lyrik und zurück. Eine kleine Geschichte der wechselseitigen Durchdringung von Dichtung und Musik [15]
Roland Ißler (Bonn)

Du texte musical au texte littéraire: Le Contrebandier. Histoire lyrique par George Sand [16]
Marie Hélène Rybicki (Potsdam)

Musik als Vorbild und Rivale. Zur Poetik des musikliterarischen «Dazwischen» in Stéphane Mallarmés musique du silence [17]
Wiebke Dehn (Osnabrück)

Le chant littéraire. Translatorische und intermediale Herausforderungen im Ulysses [18]
Vera Schanz (München)

LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 72. 306 S. 2012.

ISBN 9783862884094 (Hardbound).

ISBN 9783862905003 (e-book).

Studies in phonetics, phonology and sound change in Romance

Fernando Sánchez Miret & Daniel Recasens (eds.)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Universidad de Salamanca

This book gathers some contributions from phoneticians and phonologists working on sound change. The final goal of these contributions is to achieve a better knowledge of the causes and mechanisms of sound change through the articulatory and acoustic analysis of phonetic data and their perceptual evaluation. The papers published in this volume deal with several well-known sound changes in the field of Romance linguistics: vowel diphthongization in Italian dialects and Romanian, vowel harmony in Valencian Catalan, the origin of uvular [ʀ] in French, vowel and consonant epenthesis in the sequence /sr/ in Italian, liquid consonant dissimilation in Latin, raddoppiamento sintattico in Italian, and glide insertion and elision in the Romance languages.

Giovanni Abete
Aspetti prosodici della dittongazione spontanea in alcuni dialetti italo-romanzi  [1]

Maria Grazia Busà
Aspects of consonant cluster mutations: the case of /sr/ sequences in Italian [2]

Ricard Herrero & Jesús Jiménez
De la coarticulación a la armonía vocálica en valenciano [3]

Yves Charles Morin
From apical [r] to uvular [ʀ]: what the apico-dorsal r in Montreal French reveals about abrupt sound changes [4]

Daniela Müller
Liquid dissimilation with a special regard to Latin  [5]

Daniel Recasens
The role of coarticulation and production constraints on glide insertion and elision in the Romance languages  [6]

Antonio Romano
Osservazione e valutazione di traiettorie vocaliche su diagrammi formantici per descrivere il polimorfismo e la dittongazione nei dialetti pugliesi [7]

Michela Russo
Il Raddoppiamento Sintattico dell’italiano. Tratti prosodici e struttura fonologica [8]

Fernando Sánchez Miret
Aspectos fonéticos de la diptongación del rumano [9]

LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 73. 230pp. 2013.

ISBN 9783862884452 (Hardbound).

ISBN 9783862887828 (e-book, pdf).

A Grammar of Iranian Azari

including comparisons with Persian
Yavar Dehghani


This study intends to develop a grammar of Iranian Azari which is spoken mainly in the north western parts of Iran: it consists of phonology, morphology, and the syntax of simple and complex clauses. Since Persian has a prominent influence on this language, the phonology, morphology and syntax of borrowed words are also discussed and when appropriate, the constructions in the language are compared to that of Persian.

Table of Contents: Chapter 1 contains a description of the situation of the language, the language family, the speakers, informants, different dialects, and previous works on the language. Chapter 2 introduces the phonological system of Azari, which includes the discussion of the phonemic inventory, phonological processes, including vowel harmony with an attempt to explain it based on autosegmental theory. Chapter 3 deals with the morphology of the language, trying to distinguish the derivational and inflectional suffixes, and discussing the underlying forms of inflectional suffixes. In this chapter, compounding and reduplication are also discussed. Chapter 4 discusses the syntax of simple clauses including the case system, constituent order, imperatives, copular, interrogative, and passive constructions. In this chapter, the distinction between complements and adjuncts is explored. At the end of this chapter, morphosyntactic borrowings from Persian are discussed. Chapter 5 illustrates the syntax of complex clauses including causative constructions, complement clauses, relative clauses and adverbial clauses. Azari minimal pairs and texts are provided in the Appendix.

LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 30. 280pp. 2000.

ISBN 9783895869914 (print).

ISBN 9783862900015 (e-book, graphic pdf).

LINCOM Orientalia 10. 102pp. 2011.

ISBN 9783862900183 (print).

ISBN 9783862887842 (e-book, graphik pdf).