Edited by Evangelia Adamou, Katharina Haude and Martine Vanhove
The articles compiled in this volume offer new insights into the wealth of prosodic and syntactic phenomena involved in the encoding of information structure categories. They present data from languages which are rarely, if ever, taken into account in the most prominent approaches in information… read more
While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades, the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in… read more
Edited by Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove and Dominique Caubet
This volume presents new findings based on the analysis of spoken corpora in thirteen different Afro-Asiatic languages – a unique endeavor in the domain of lesser-described languages. It will be of interest to corpus linguists, general linguists, typologists, and linguists specializing in… read more
Edited by Bernard Comrie, Ray Fabri, Elizabeth Hume, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz and Martine Vanhove
This collection of articles highlights a selection of on-going research projects. Phonological, morphological, and syntactic issues are addressed by international experts on Maltese. The diachronic development of Maltese, its age-long contact with Italo-Romance, and the present diglossic situation… read more
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of… read more
This chapter studies the perception words associated with the so-called “lower senses” (olfaction, gustatory and tactile perceptions) in Beja, a Cushitic language spoken mainly in Sudan, from three different perspectives. The first one concerns the organization of the related lexicon from the… read more
This chapter is the first large-scale typological survey of the lexical means used in African languages to express color-related meanings. It is based on a very large sample, with data from 350 languages, most of which come from the RefLex online lexical database. It focuses on language-internal… read more
The evaluative morphology of Beja consists of four devices: gender shift to feminine on nouns, and sound change (r>l) on nouns, verbs and adjectives form the diminutives. A suffix -loːj on adjectives, and -l on Manner converbs, form the augmentatives. The analysis focuses on the evaluative,… read more
This paper presents an overview of the morphosyntax of comparative, equative and similative constructions in Beja, a Cushitic language spoken in Sudan. It also discusses their relevance for current typological models and the extent to which they are at variance with the existing literature (Stassen… read more
This paper focuses on the formal properties and uses of nonfinite constructions in Beja (Cushitic) with the Manner converb, and its refinitization as a Perfect paradigm. The analysis is carried out against the background of typological studies on converbs and copredicative constructions. This… read more
This chapter investigates, in a crosslinguistic perspective, the relationship between prosodic contours and direct and indirect reported speech (i.e. without or with deictic shift) in four typologically and genetically different Afroasiatic languages of the CorpAfroAs pilot corpus: Beja (Cushitic),… read more
Several particles in the Arabic variety spoken in the area of Yafi’ (Yemen) show tight recurring links between deixis, informational hierarchy, and syntactic hierarchy, both diachronically and synchronically. In the light of Robert’s (1993, 2000) findings on focusing strategies, these links are… read more
In this article, we hypothesize that some of the structural properties of paradigmatic graphs of the hierarchical small world type are to be found in all natural languages. Within this hypothesis of the universal structure of paradigmatic graphs, we explore a method for the automatic analysis of… read more
Following previous works (Sweetser 1990; Evans & Wilkins 2000) on the semantic extensions of verbs expressing sensory modalities and prehension to other semantic domains, this study investigates the semantic associations between vision, hearing, prehension, and mental perception in a sample of 25… read more
