Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics

by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Editor), R. M. W. Dixon (Editor)

Overview

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. Its editors and authors aim to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199283088
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	04/27/2006
Series:	Explorations in Linguistic Typology Series
Pages:	470
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor of Lingusitics, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University. She worked in the North Africa and Middle East section of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and was then Professor of Linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Caterina in Brazil before coming to Australia in 1994. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, grammars of Modern and Biblical Hebrew. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare, Warekena, and Tariana, in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Professor R. M. W. Dixon is Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University. He has written grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiny), published one survey volume ('The Languages of Australia', 1980), and is currently working on a comprehensive areal study of all 247 languages of the continent. For the past nine years he has been working in the southern Amazonian jungle of Brazil, writing a grammar of Jarawara, and pursuing a comparative study of the Arawa language family.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon
2. Archaeology and the Historical Determinants of Punctuation in Language Family Origins, Peter Bellwood
3. An Indo-European Linguistic Area and its Characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal Diffusion as a Challenge to the Comparative Method?, Calvert Watkins
4. The Australian Linguistic Area, R. M. W. Dixon
5. Descent and Diffusion: The Complexity of the Pilbara Situation, Alan Dench
6. Contact-Induced Change in Oceanic Languages in Northwest Melanesia, Malcolm Ross
7. Areal Diffusion, Genetic Inheritance and Problems of Subgrouping: A North Arawak Case Study, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
8. Language Diffusion in Present-Day East Anatolia: From Top to Bottom, Geoffrey Haig
9. The Role of Migration and Language Contact in the Development of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family, Randy J. LaPolla
10. On Genetic and Areal Linguistics in Mainland Southeast Asia: Parallel Polyfunctionality of 'Acquire', N. J. Enfield
11. Genetic Versus Contact Relationship: Prosodic Diffusibility in Southeast Asian Languages, James A. Matisoff
12. Language Contact and Areal Diffusion in Sinitic Languages, Hilary Chappell
13. Areal Diffusion Versus Genetic Inheritance: An African Perspective, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
14. Convergence and Divergence in the Development of African Languages, Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva
15. What Language Features can be 'Borrowed'?, Timothy Jowan Curnow

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a valuable set of case studies on language contact and will provide much food for thought in the future." —Anthropological Linguistics

From the Publisher