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In this book, the author presents the results of her analysis of the use of the two tenses, imparfait and passé simple, in French narrative discourse. One conclusion she reaches is that these two tenses can be defined as `state' and `event', respectively, and that, with such definitions, different temporal and aspectual values that have traditionally been associated with these two tenses can be united.

The articles in this volume came out of a workshop held by the editors in 1990 on the campus of Pattimura University, in Ambon, Maluku, Indonesia. In these articles, the phonologies of the Sawai, Kisar, Larike, and West Tarangan languages are described. Also, maps and information about the languages' locations, various ethnic features, and suggested classifications are included in the book.

This book utilizes principles of discourse analysis, cultural anthropology, and biblical studies to analyze First Corinthians. It draws on concepts of text organization from the work of Robert E. Longacre and Kenneth L. Pike. It demonstrates that discourse analysis is an important tool for the study of texts, even ancient ones.

Sentence repetition testing (SRT) is a methodology for investigating patterns of community-wide bilingualism. It is a screening device for testing for bilingualism in an entire community, and it is a valid test for second-language proficiency. High correlations have been found between the performance of second-language speakers on SRTs and descriptive estimations of second-language proficiency. These two methodologies give promise of being reliable in the assessment of language proficiency in low literacy rate contexts.

Shows how to conduct sociolinguistic surveys on a small scale without access to funding sometimes available to national language planners. Prepares to train people with little background in social research methodology. Spells out how those primarily concerned with local languages can learn to make informed decisions about language choice at local levels. Provides invaluable background on bilingualism and language use and attitudes. Shows how bilingualism develops and is maintained in different situations. Describes several methods for testing dialect comprehensibility in considerable detail, and gives advantages and disadvantages of each. It combines academic sophistication with realism and is a major contribution for conducting sociolinguistic surveys in general.

Presents results of study of the factors that affect literacy acquisition in both the mother tongue and Spanish by the indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon.

Discusses how Otomí verb prefixes include deixis in their function. States that a key element to understanding the makeup of Otomí verbs is the role of deixis in the verb and elsewhere in the sentence. Discusses how every independent Otomi sentence is grounded in reality through deixis, and every dependent sentence depends upon deictic grounding in sentences around it.

This book describes the sound system of Mono, a Banda language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Morphology and acoustic phonetics are discussed in order to inform the phonological analysis. Several interlinear texts and a wordlist are included. Notable features of the Mono sound system include: A phonemic bilabial flap with velarization, An eight-vowel system with fewer front vowels than back vowels, A three-level tone system that includes tonal morphemes, a tonal melody on some locative adverbs, and tonal polarity on morphologically complex prepositions, Labialization and palatalization realized as o̯ and e̯, respectively, that can accompany (among other segments) h and ʔ, Echo vowel epenthesis causing a /CLV1/ underlying syllable pattern to realized as [CV1LV1], Prothetic augmentation of subminimal nominal roots, including overapplication that results in a non-surface-apparent opacity effect, and Leftward vowel feature spreading subject to implicational restrictions. Kenneth Olson received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2001 from the University of Chicago. He has worked with SIL since 1989 and has had an ongoing research program on the Mono language since 1994. He has taught at the University of Oregon, the Faculté de Théologie Evangélique de Bangui, and the SIL European Training Programme. He is currently the Associate International Linguistics Coordinator for SIL and an adjunct associate professor at the University of North Dakota.

The study of evidentiality is in its relative infancy, and each new study in this largely unexplored area of linguistic structure reveals subtleties of grammatical and semantic behavior that give reason to reconsider and deepen analyses found in previous works. Evidentiality is usually discussed in terms of the kinds of justification a speaker has for making a particular assertion. When the author first began studying the Wanka Quechua language, he was immediately struck with the fact that the evidential system was not behaving as he had expected. Careful consideration of the individual markers revealed semantic nuances that are not usually found in other treatments on this topic. This volume provides a detailed look at the semantics of the evidential system of one Quechua language with implications for others. Parallels are noted with evidential systems of unrelated languages. The author analyzes the Wanka Quechua evidential system using a cognitive view of grammar and applies this approach to issues of semantics and category structure.

The temporal categories of tense and aspect have received much attention in linguistic literature. But often scholars concentrate on their grammatical description without regard to their function in discourse. This work is a comprehensive and systematic description of the function of tense and aspect in the Obolo language. The data for this study are ten texts, both written and oral, from the Ngo dialect of Obolo, which is spoken in southeastern coastal Nigeria. They represent the four main discourse genres of narrative, procedural, expository, and hortatory. In the model adopted for this work, the discussion of tense and aspect in the sentence correlates with the referential component, while the discussion of the discourse functions of tense and aspect correlates with the textual component.

The purpose of this study is to provide a generative and autosegmental phonological analysis of the Zaiwa language with emphasis on prosodic components. This is a preliminary phonology of Zaiwa with a relatively complete treatment of all phonological aspects, concentrating on suprasegmental components. The generative/autosegmental framework employed incorporates feature geometry in a manner that provides a view of the interaction of segmentals and suprasegmentals. In particular, the interaction of voice quality, tone, and consonantal features are presented using feature geometry and underspecification in order to differentiate lexical tone from derived tone. It is the author''s goal to provide a basis for understanding the processes occurring in Zaiwa phonology and provide helpful insights in understanding similar processes in other Tibeto-Burman languages.

Case Grammar has been around for a long time. Other theories have come and gone. Why a book on Case Grammar now? Dr. Walter Cook, S.J., is one of the promoters of the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics and author of numerous publications in linguistics. In "Case Grammar Theory" (1989), the author described the Case Grammar models of Fillmore, Chafe, Anderson, Gruber, Jackendoff, and some tagmemicists as contrasting models within Case Grammar theory. In the present volume, intended as a companion volume to the previous one, we find a methodology for Case Grammar, tested in extended textual analysis including Ernest Hemingway''s "The Old Man and the Sea." Because Case Grammar lends itself well to displaying the way syntactic features are associated with semantic structures, the author is able to use Case Grammar as an unusually clear, simple guide for sentence analysis.

The Cubeo people live principally along the Vaupés, Cuduyarí, and Querarí Rivers in the northwestern Amazon River Basin. Although the Cubeos have had contact with people outside their communities since the sixteenth century, their language and culture have remained largely intact. In this fifth volume in the series of Colombia language studies, the reader gains an overview of Cubeo phonology and morphophonemics, word classes, clause structure, and subordination. The text is richly supplemented with examples. The various affixes presented in the text are listed in the first appendix with their glosses and a reference to the sections in which the affixes are discussed. In the second appendix, the practical orthography is summarized. This grammar is especially interesting for linguists studying languages of the Tuconoan language family. The distinctive features of Cubeo grammar are the extensive system of classifiers for nouns and their modifiers, the evidential system for verbs indicating the source or validity of the information communicated, and a basic division of all verbs into two categories-stative and dynamic.