The Languages of Native North America

by Marianne Mithun

Overview

This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107384583
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2001
Series:	Cambridge Language Surveys
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	39 MB
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Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. The Nature of the Languages: 1. Sounds and sound patterns; 2. Words; 3. Grammatical categories; 4. Sentences; 5. Special language; Part II. Catalogue of Languages: 6. Relations among the languages; 7. Catalogue.

Editorial Reviews

The first section of this two-part work provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, treating topics such as phonological characteristics; morphological issues; grammatical distinctions (of number, gender, shape, etc.); structural distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; the nature of grammatical relations; and special speech styles such as those used with children and those attributed to men or women. The second section catalogues languages by family, with details of genetic relationships, the locations and numbers of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Mithun is affiliated with the linguistics department at the U. of California, Santa Barbara. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

'This volume is a most welcome continuation of a most useful series. it is a great pleasure to review Marianne Mithun's The Languages of Native North America in the Cambridge Language Surveys, since one can only express admiration for the tremendous amount of labour behind this book. There are very few people in modern native North American linguistics, if any, who could do an equally beautiful job as Mithun.' Linguistic Typology

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