The Languages of Native North America / Edition 1

by Marianne Mithun

Overview

This book is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the native North American languages. These several hundred languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. The book includes an overview of their special characteristics, descriptions of special styles, a catalog of the languages that details their locations, genetic affiliations, number of speakers, and major structural features, and lists published material on them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521298759
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2001
Series:	Cambridge Language Surveys
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	796
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 9.33(h) x 1.65(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. The Nature of the Languages: 1. Sounds and sound patterns; 2. Words; 3. Grammatical categories; 4. Sentences; 5. Special language; Part II. Catalogue of Languages: 6. Relations among the languages; 7. Catalogue.

Editorial Reviews

'This volume is a most welcome continuation of a most useful series. it is a great pleasure to review Marianne Mithun's The Languages of Native North America in the Cambridge Language Surveys, since one can only express admiration for the tremendous amount of labour behind this book. There are very few people in modern native North American linguistics, if any, who could do an equally beautiful job as Mithun.' Linguistic Typology

From the Publisher

The first section of this two-part work provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, treating topics such as phonological characteristics; morphological issues; grammatical distinctions (of number, gender, shape, etc.); structural distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; the nature of grammatical relations; and special speech styles such as those used with children and those attributed to men or women. The second section catalogues languages by family, with details of genetic relationships, the locations and numbers of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Mithun is affiliated with the linguistics department at the U. of California, Santa Barbara. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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