The Life Cycle Of Language

This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Selis-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.

This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Seliš-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The Life Cycle of a Butterfly explains in simple terms the transformation from pupa to chrysalis to butterfly. Beautifully illustrated, the book also takes a close up look at the caterpillar, one of nature's eating machines" and shows why monarchs fly 4,000 miles after metamorphosis.

This book examines the endangered languages of Africa from both documentary and theoretical perspectives, highlighting the threats of extinction many of them face and the challenges and implications each bring to bear on linguistic theory. It focuses on the symbiosis between documentary and theoretical methodologies, and its consequences for the preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly.

This critical overview examines every aspect of the field including its history, key current research questions and methods, theoretical perspectives, and sociolinguistic factors. The authors represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective. The book is a valuable resource for phonologists and a stimulating guide for their students.

Describes the physical characteristics, habitat, life cycle, and behaviour of emperor penguins as well as threats they face and what can be done to help them.

This stunning illustrated children's book takes an innovative look at the circle of life, including animals, dinosaurs, stars, volcanoes, and even YOU. Everything has a beginning and an end, but what happens in between? Follow the migration of zebra across the vast plains, meet penguins guarding their eggs on the ice, and watch butterflies emerge from their cocoons. Shoot back in time 4.5 billion years to see how planet Earth was formed and then leap into the future to see what happens when stars die. Discover a new life cycle every time you turn the page. You'll take a closer look at the life cycles of environments, too. Discover how a river forms and changes over time. Find out how a tree grows and all of the other life cycles it supports within it. See the amazing sculptures the ocean waves carve out of cliffs. Dive beneath the surface to see how coral reefs form, and what causes them to die. Follow the life cycles of weather--from the water cycle to ice ages, to give you a better grasp of the climate situation we find ourselves in now. From the single-celled amoeba to how the Earth formed, the life cycles in this ebook have been carefully chosen to give you an amazing overview of the universe, and how everything is intricately linked. Filled with facts to amaze your friends, stunning photography, and beautifully detailed illustrations by Sam Falconer, Life Cycles gets to grips with the essence of life itself.

Humans are vastly diverse, but all humans are mammals and go through the same life cycle. Learn more about each life stage in this fascinating book. Captivating photographs support the text and give readers a deeper understanding of a human's life cycle. A table of contents, a glossary, sidebars, informative captions, critical-thinking questions, sources for further research, and an index are included to increase comprehension.

Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause, most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers, which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages, however, adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further, becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is, the process by which, having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions, they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals, and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators, wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek, its theoretical perspective is broader, perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions, how they mutate over time. While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship, this study is firmly wedded to the assumption, indeed presupposition, that Homeric Greek is just another natural language, spoken before written, designed as an instrument of communication, and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further, that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. Lastly, in analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek, this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction.