Semi-direct speech: Manambu and beyond

Every language has some way of reporting what someone else has said. To express what Jakobson [Jakobson, R., 1990. Shifters, categories, and the Russian verb. Selected writings. Word and Language. Mouton, The Hague, Paris, pp. 130–153] called ‘speech within speech’, the speaker can use their own words, recasting the original text as their own, within an ‘indirect’ speech construction. Or the other person may be quoted ‘directly’, just as they said it, or more or less so. One major difference between direct and indirect speech lies in the way person specification within the speech report is cast. In direct speech, person reference is expressed exactly as it was in the original speech report. In indirect speech, the person reference is shifted to the perspective of the speaker. There is a third option – a ‘middle ground’ situation known as ‘semi-direct’ speech – with incomplete person shift. Semi-direct speech often involves coreferentiality between the current speaker – rather than the author of the speech report – and a participant within the speech report. In Manambu, a Ndu language spoken in the New Guinea area, semi-direct speech differs from both direct and indirect speech in a few interesting ways. Further examples of semi-direct speech and its various guises comefrom a number of African languages, other languages from New Guinea area, and Colloquial English. The existence of a semi-direct speech construction brings an additional dimension to the typology of speech reports: the necessity of including the perspective of current speaker in the overall picture

Classifiers: a typology of noun categorization devices

Almost all languages have some grammatical means for categorizing nouns. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition

Language Contact in Amazonia

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. The author explains the relationship between a real diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and reveals the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. Professor Aikhenvald uses the example of Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the large area of the Vaupés river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing, interaction, and influence are resisted for ideological reasons. The book considers which grammatical categories are most and least likely to be borrowed in a situation of prolonged language contact where lexical borrowing is reduced to a minimum. The author provides a genetic analysis of the languages of the region and considers their historical relationships with languages of the same family outside it. She also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic and cultural effects of being part of a group that is aware of the threat to its language and identity. The book is presented in relatively nontechnical language and will interest linguists and anthropologists

On future in commands

[Extract] In many languages of the world, the status of 'future' is different from that of present and of past. Past events can be conceived as known through observation, inference, assumption, or report. Statements about the future may involve speculation, prediction, guesses, and so on. In some languages future refers to the location of an event in time, and can be considered a grammatical tense, on a par with past (and also present). In others, future time can be expressed through a plethora of modalities (including intentional and potential forms) and irrealis (see Dixon 2012: 22-8). The expression of future tense and of future time may interact with other categories in grammar, along the lines of dependencies between grammatical systems as outlined in Aikhenvald and Dixon (1998)

How Gender Shapes the World

This is a book about the multi-faceted notion of gender. Gender differences form the basis for family life, patterns of socialization, distribution of tasks, and spheres of responsibilities. The way gender is articulated shapes the world of individuals, and of the societies they live in. Gender has three faces: Linguistic Gender-the original sense of 'gender'-is a feature of many languages and reflects the division of nouns into grammatical classes or genders (feminine, masculine, neuter, and so on); Natural Gender, or sex, refers to the division of animates into males and females; and Social Gender reflects the social implications and norms of being a man or a woman (or perhaps something else). Women and men may talk and behave differently, depending on conventions within the societies they live in, and their role in language maintenance can also vary. The book focuses on how gender in its many guises is reflected in human languages, how it features in myths and metaphors, and the role it plays in human cognition. Examples are drawn from all over the world, with a special focus on Aikhenvald's extensive fieldwork in Amazonia and New Guinea

The legacy of youth: the seeds of change and the diversity of voices in Papua New Guinea

Linguistic diversity in Papua New Guinea comes in many guises —diversity of genetic groups, diversity in language numbers, and diversity of linguistic structures and forms. Add to this the diversity of genres and speech registers available in the speech repertoire of every thriving language community. TRANSGENERATIONAL diversity adds a further dimension to this. Young people develop new forms, new ways of saying things, and even new languages. And they are hardly a minority or a negligible group. Within the context of PNG an estimated 76% of the population are aged under thirty five; 40% of the population are aged under fifteen

Imperatives and Commands

This is the first cross-linguistic study of imperatives, and commands of other kinds, across the world's languages. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. The author discusses the role imperatives and commands play in human cognition and how they are deployed in different cultures, and in doing so offers fresh insights on patterns of human interaction and communcation. Alexandra Aikhenvald examines the ways of framing commands, or command strategies, in languages that do not have special imperative forms. She analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of positive and negative imperatives and shows how these correlate with categories such as tense, information source, and politeness. She looks at the relation of command pragmatics to cultural practices, assessing, for example, the basis for Margaret Mead's assumption that the harsher the people the more frequently they use imperatives. Professor Aikhenvald covers a wide range of language families, including many relatively neglected examples from North America, Amazonia, and New Guinea. The book is accompanied by illustrations of some conventional command signs. Written and presented with the author's characteristic clarity, this book will be welcomed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. It will appeal to social and cultural anthropologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists

The Languages of the Amazon

This is the first guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia, which include some of the most the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction. Alexandra Aikhenvald, one of the world's leading experts on the region, provides an account of the more than 300 languages, comparing their common and unique features, setting out their main characteristics, and describing the histories and cultures of the people who speak them. The languages abound in rare features and in most cases have been in contact with each other for generations, giving rise to complex patterns of linguistic influence. The author draws on her own extensive field research to tease out and analyse the patterns of their genetic and structural diversity. In the process she shows how they reflect the interrelations of language and culture: different kinship systems, for example, produce different linguistic outcomes. She also explains the roles and workings of their unusual features including evidentials, tones and whistles, and elaborate positional verbs. The book ends with a glossary of terms, and a comprehensive list of references for those interested in following up a language or linguistic phenomenon

Comparison, contrast and similarity in Yalaku

Yalaku, a Ndu language from the Middle Sepik region of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, has no dedicated comparative construction — just like an overwhelming majority of Papuan languages of New Guinea (de Vries 2015). After a brief outline of typological features of the language, we turn to the ways of expressing comparative meanings. The expression of similarity is the topic of §3. The last section contains a summary

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan