Search

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic study of all verbal classes and categories of theTocharian branch of Indo-European. It lists all attested Tocharian verbal forms, together withsemantic and etymological information. The material has been subject to careful philologicalevaluation and incorporates unedited or unpublished texts of the Berlin, London, and Pariscollections. In addition, this study consistently takes into account the linguistic variation within the Tocharian B language and the relative chronology of texts. Moreover, Tocharian offers crucial evidence for the reconstruction of the PIE verbal system, and is also of interest to the general linguist for the interaction of voice and valency.

In The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls Ken M. Penner determines whether Qumran Hebrew finite verbs are primarily temporal, aspectual, or modal. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect-prominent in the Bible, and tense-prominent in the Mishnah. But the semantic value of the verb forms in the intervening period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written has remained controversial.Penner answers the question of Qumran Hebrew verb form semantics using an empirical method: a database calculating the correlation between each form and each function, establishing that the ancient author's selection of verb form is determined not by aspect, but by tense or modality. Penner then applies these findings to controversial interpretations of three Qumran texts.

This book is the first detailed investigation of the translation of the Hebrew verbs of Chronicles into Greek, especially from the perspective of two diachronic developments: that of the Hebrew verbal system and that of the trend toward a more literal translation of the Bible. The translation provides a view of the Hebrew verbal system in the Hellenistic period (approx. 150 BCE) as part of the continuum in the development of the Hebrew verbal system from classical biblical Hebrew to Mishnaic Hebrew. The translation also testifies to the trend in the process of the translation of the Bible from the freer (but still literal) translation of the Pentateuch and Samuel/Kings to the slavishly literal translation of Aquila.

This book explains the verbal system of the Aramaic of Daniel in the context of current research on grammaticalization, which, though first mentioned by Meillet in 1912, did not flourish until the beginning of the 1980's, and has only more recently been applied to the study of Ancient Near Eastern languages. Although various aspects of the Aramaic of Daniel have been subject of numerous studies, including a few exhaustive studies on the verbal system in the last century, it remains among the most difficult to explain. The explanation offered here is coherent with the historical development of Aramaic as well as the observable tendencies in the development of human languages in general.

This book constitutes the first detailed corpus-based analysis of the verbal morphology and syntax employed in the Eastern European Maskilic (Jewish Enlightenment) Hebrew prose fiction written between 1857 and 1881. This verbal system exhibits biblical, rabbinic and medieval elements as well as unprecedented features and similarities to Israeli Hebrew and Yiddish. The first section of the work offers a selective examination of maskilic verbal morphology, while the second section constitutes a thorough examination of the functions of the verbal conjugations and the third section surveys selected features of verbal syntax. The work fills a serious gap in the Hebrew philological literature and will therefore be of great relevance to students and scholars of diachronic Hebrew language and linguistics.

This volume is a revised and enlarged version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation (1999). It gives a comprehensive analysis of the morphosyntax and syntax of the tenses in the Hebrew text of Ben Sira. Due attention is paid to the heterogeneous character of the textual evidence (three manuscripts from the Desert of Judah and six mediaeval manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza), which complicates any linguistic study of Ben Sira. A descriptive analysis is complemented by a comparison with other contemporaneous, earlier, and later forms of Hebrew. It is argued that the Hebrew of Ben Sira is a literary language in its own right, rather than an imitation of Biblical Hebrew or a predecessor of Mishnaic Hebrew.

The recent publication of texts from the early and middle periods of Christian Palestinian Aramaic makes possible a more accurate description of the syntax of this form of Aramaic than heretofore. However, since virtually all CPA texts consist of translations, one cannot adequately discuss its verbal system without taking into account translation technique. Therefore, the present study consists of a study of the translation of Greek Indicative verbs in the CPA Gospels and its implications for the understanding of the CPA verbal system. Chapter one explains the methodology and the conventions used in this book. Chapters two to seven describe the translation of six Greek Indicative tenses, i.e., the Imperfect, Present, Future, Aorist, Perfect, and Pluperfect, along with related periphrastic verbal phrases. Chapter eight then explores the implications of the previous chapters for the understanding of both translation technique and the CPA verbal system. The presence of textual, stylistic, and/or idiomatic variation in an otherwise literal translation provides useful clues concerning both the nature of the CPA translation and the functions of CPA verbs. Hence, the evidence afforded by translation technique concerning the syntax and morphosyntax of the CPA verbal system is discussed in light of synchronic and diachronic comparative evidence. Chapter nine offers some concluding thoughts.

As virtually all Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts consist of translations, one cannot adequately discuss its verbal system without taking into account translation technique. The present study consists of a study of the translation of Greek Indicative verbs in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Gospels and its implications for the understanding of the Christian Palestinian Aramaic verbal system.

The consecutive tenses are fundamental in all descriptions of Classical Hebrew grammar. They are even basic to the textbooks on Biblical Hebrew. Being fundamental in the verbal system, and part of any beginner's grammar, they pose a serious problem to a linguistic understanding of the verbal system, since grammars describe an alternation of ‘forms'or ‘tenses'in double pairs: wayyiqṭol alternates with its ‘equivalent'qaṭal, and wə-qaṭal alternates with its ‘equivalent'yiqṭol. This ‘enigma'in the verbal system is handled in the book by recognising that the alternation of the consecutive tenses with other tenses, in the reality of the text, represents a linking of clauses. The ‘consecutive tenses'are clause-types with a natural language connective wa- directly followed by a finite verbal morpheme, a type of clause that expressed continuity in the earliest stage of Semitic. The commonly held assumption that there is a special ‘consecutive waw'is unwarranted. The use of the ‘consecutive'clause-types in order to express discourse continuity indicates that Classical Hebrew has retained the old unmarked declarative word order of Semitic syntax. Seen in the light of recent research on the Tiberian reading tradition, the ‘consecutive'wayyiqṭol can be analysed as a retention of the old Semitic past perfective •wa-yaqtul, which was pronounced wa-yiqṭol in Classical Hebrew. The ‘consecutive'wə-qāṭal (pronounced wa-qaṭal in the classical language) constitutes the result of an internal Hebrew development into a construction (in the sense of Joan Bybee) already foreshadowed in the earliest Northwest Semitic languages. The book understands the ‘consecutive tenses'as discourse continuity clauses, which typically form chains of main line clauses. Such chains can be interrupted by other types of clauses. This interruption is a clause linking that receives special attention in the interpretation of the Classical Hebrew verbal system. Chapter six presents a regenerated text linguistics founded on the new terminology. A clause linking approach is the central methodological procedure in this book. To this must be added diachronic typology in a comparative Semitic setting. The linguistic examples of clause linking are gathered from a large Classical Hebrew corpus, the Pentateuch and the Book of Judges, and made searchable in a database of 6559 non-archaic text records.

This is the first major study of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system of a prophetic book. It is also the first book-length study in over 60 years to focus on how genre affects the Hebrew verbal system. It advances a data-driven argument that Biblical Hebrew verb forms do not function one way in prose and another way in poetry. Lastly, the author addresses the diachronic development of Hebrew between the destruction of the First Temple and the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This book provides a new explanation for what has long been a challenge for scholars of Biblical Hebrew: how to understand the expression of verbal tense and aspect.Working from a representative text corpus, combined with database queries of specific usages and surveys of examples discussed in the scholarly literature, Ulf Bergström gives a comprehensive overview of the semantic meanings of the verbal forms, along with a significant sample of the variation of pragmatically inferred tense, aspect, or modality (TAM) meanings. Bergström applies diachronic typology and a redefined concept of aspect to demonstrate that Biblical Hebrew verbal forms have basic aspectual and derived temporal meanings and that communicative appeal, the action-triggering function of language, affects verbal semantics and promotes the diversification of tense meanings. Bergström's overarching explanation of the semantic development of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system is an important contribution to the study of the evolution of the verbal system and meanings of individual verbs in the Hebrew Bible. Accessibly written and structured for seminar use, Bergström's study brings new perspectives to a debate that, in many ways, had reached a stalemate, and it challenges scholars working with TAM and the Biblical Hebrew verb to revisit their theoretical premises. Advanced students and scholars of Biblical Hebrew and other Semitic languages will find the study thought provoking, and linguists will appreciate its contributions to linguistic theory and typology.

This volume is a comprehensive grammar of the Turkish language, suitable both for students of the Turkish language and linguistic scholars. Gerjan van Schaaik draws on sound linguistic research and an extensive corpus of real-life data, alongside more than twenty years of feedback from university classrooms, to provide the most complete, up-to-date, and practically useful survey of the Turkish language ever compiled. Following an introduction that provides background information on the Turkic languages and an overview of the linguistic terminology adopted in the volume, the first part of the book explores the fundamentals of Turkish spelling and pronunciation. Parts II and III explore the noun phrase and adjuncts and modifiers, respectively, while Parts IV and V examine the verbal system and sentence structure. These first five parts together represent a valuable overview of the fundamentals of Turkish grammar. Part VI provides an account of the ways in which new words are constructed on the basis of existing material, and constitutes a bridge to the more advanced matter treated in parts VII and VIII, including relative clauses, subordination, embedded clauses, clausal complements and the finer points of the verbal system. The work will be accompanied by a companion website that will provide exercises to accompany each part.

This study offers a synchronic and diachronic account of the Biblical Hebrew verbal tense system during the Second Temple period, based on the books of Esther, Daniel, and Ezra and Nehemiah, along with the non-synoptic parts of Chronicles. In analyzing the development of this system, Cohen discerns the changes that mark the transition from the classical era to the Second Temple period. The book is divided into two main parts: a survey of previous research along with the methodology of the present study; and a descriptive analysis of the verbal system in late biblical prose literature. In the first section, the author discusses the eclectic nature of the biblical corpus, including the ramifications of this heterogeneity on linguistic efforts to for mulate a synchronic structural account of its texts. Moreover, he surveys the principal linguistic concepts of tense, aspect, and mood, and the ver bal paradigm's complex nature. The second part of the book offers a synchronic account of the Second Temple period verbal system. It features a categorical breakdown and analysis of all the verb forms in the corpus's prose texts. The author examines the reasons behind these changes by dint of a diachronic comparison with other strata of the Hebrew language—namely, biblical texts of the First Temple period, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the language of the Sages.

'Research on the function and semantics of the verbal system in Hebrew (and Semitics in general) has been in constant ferment since McFall's 1982 work The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System. Elizabeth Robar's analysis provides the best solution to this point, combining cognitive linguistics, cross-linguistics, diachronic and synchronic analysis. Her solution is brilliant, innovative, and supremely satisfying in interpreting all the data with great explanatory power. Let us hope this research will be quickly implemented in grammars of Hebrew.'Peter J. Gentry, Donald L. Williams Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY.In The Verb and the Paragraph in Biblical Hebrew, Elizabeth Robar employs cognitive linguistics to unravel the notorious grammatical quandary in biblical Hebrew: explaining the waw consecutive, as well as other poorly understood verbal forms (e.g. with paragogic suffixes). She explains that languages must communicate the shape of thought units: including the prototypical paragraph, with its beginning, middle and ending; and its message. She demonstrates how the waw consecutive is both simpler and more nuanced than often argued. It neither foregrounds nor is a preterite, but it enables highly embedded textual structures. She also shows how allegedly anomalous forms may be used for thematic purposes, guiding the reader to the author's intended interpretation for the text as it stands.

During the past century, numerous books and articles have appeared on the verbal system of Semitic languages. Thanks to the discovery of Ugaritic texts, Akkadian tablets, Canaanite letters found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, our understanding of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the Semitic languages has increased substantially.Dallaire focuses primarily on prose texts in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite in which the verbal system (morphemes, syntax) expresses nuances of wishes, desires, requests, and commands. According to her, volitional concepts are found in every language and are expressed through verbal morphemes, syntagmas, intonation, syntax, and other linguistic means.The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose attempts to answer the following questions: Do volitives function in a similar way in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite? Where and why is there overlap in morphology and syntax between these two languages? What morphological and syntactical differences exist between the volitional expressions of the languages? In attempting to answer these questions, the author bears in mind the fact that, within each of these two languages, scribes from different areas used specific dialectal and scribal traditions (for example, northern versus southern, peripheral versus central).

This book presents the results of a field research on the verbal system of Soqotri, a little-studied language spoken on the island of Soqotra (Arabian Sea) and belonging to the Modern South Arabian branch of Semitic. The investigation focuses on the so-called T-stems (marked by the infix -t-), mostly employed as derivational means of detransitivisation. In this book you will find comprehensive descriptions of the synchronic morphology and semantics of the T-stems, as well as an inquiry into their diachronic background. Simultaneously, the study is a contribution to the general typology of detransitivising derivation in the languages of the world.

As one of the most central categories of the Tocharian verb, the subjunctive is of utmost importance for the reconstruction of the verbal system, the most rewarding domain of Tocharian historical grammar. Michaël Peyrot provides a thorough analysis of the formation of the subjunctive in both Tocharian languages, and establishes its meaning on the basis of a systematic investigation of a wealth of published and unpublished texts. A careful reconstruction of the Proto-Tocharian stage provides a solid base for the comparison with Indo-European and the derivation of the Tocharian subjunctive from the proto-language. With its focus on the wide variety of intricate morphological patterns, The Tocharian Subjunctive is at the same time a study of the whole Tocharian verbal system.

Cheyenne: An Analysis of Clause Linkage provides a detailed description of Cheyenne syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, notably on its nominal and verbal system and in both simple and complex sentences.Based on fieldwork conducted on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, this book, which seeks to address descriptive and theoretical issues involving complex sentences, has three major aims: i) to present a morpho-syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic description of complex sentences in Cheyenne; ii) to investigate the relationship between the semantic and syntactic dimensions of complex sentences; and iii) to contribute to the research, preservation, and revitalization of this ancestral language spoken in the United States of America.This book will be informative for scholars interested in language typology, comparative linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and language documentation, as well as those interested in Cheyenne learning and teaching.

Modern Irish is a VSO language, in common with the other Celtic languages, and the order of elements in the structure of transitive sentences is verb–subject–object. This book provides a characterization of the nominal, verb, clause and information structure of the Irish language from a functional perspective based on Role and Reference Grammar. Included in this analysis are the layered structure of the noun phrase of Irish and the various NP operators, the layered structure of the clause and the verbal system at the syntax–semantic interface along with a number of verb valence behaviours as mediated by event and argument structure. The book also surveys previous treatments of Irish within a functionalist approach. The verbal noun has a special place within the Irish language and its deployment is particularly productive. The book examines the derivation of the verbal noun and the contexts in which it is used. It also provides an account of light verbs and complex predicates as they occur within Irish and links this to a characterization of the information structure of Irish. Additionally it provides an analysis of certain linguistically interesting phenomena that are particular to Irish (and the other Celtic languages) including the two verbs of ‘to be'. Within the verbal system the author's concern is with the relationship between the semantic representation of a verbal predicate in the context of a clause and its syntactic expression through the argument structure of the verb. He suggests that lexical specification is via a logical representation that reflects the aspectual decomposition of the verbal predicate and that this determines, with an actor–undergoer hierarchy, the operation of the mapping into syntax via the linking system.

The book provides a detailed empirical approach to constructing grammatical analysis and theory, in particular the analysis of English verbs. It develops an integrated formal description of the English verbal system and offers several theoretical advances in the treatment of verbs that have escaped formulation until now.

The newly revised edition of this groundbreaking textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the theory, research, and applications of nonverbal communication. Authored by three of the foremost scholars in the field and drawing on multidisciplinary research from communication studies, psychology, linguistics, and family studies, Nonverbal Communication speaks to today's students with modern examples that illustrate nonverbal communication in their lived experiences. It emphasizes nonverbal codes as well as the functions they perform to help students see how nonverbal cues work with one another and with the verbal system through which we create and understand messages and shows how consequential nonverbal means of communicating are in people's lives. Chapters cover the social and biological foundations of nonverbal communication as well as the expression of emotions, interpersonal conversation, deception, power, and influence. This edition includes new content on “Influencing Others,” as well as a revised chapter on “Displaying Identities, Managing Images, and Forming Impressions” that combines identity, impression management, and person perception.Nonverbal Communication serves as a core textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in communication and psychology.Online resources for instructors, including an extensive instructor's manual with sample exercises and a test bank, are available at www.routledge.com/9780367557386

Ngardi is a highly endangered language with fewer than 10 remaining speakers and is no longer being acquired by children. Despite the limited circulation of a draft dictionary (Cataldi, 2011), there has been no published reference grammar of this language. Upon publication, this work will constitute the most comprehensive grammar of any Ngumpin-Yapa language. The Ngardi language exhibits many of the same typologically interesting features first identified in the related language Warlpiri—namely phenomena of non-configurational syntax and null anaphora. This grammar also brings to light a number of unique properties which will be of interest to linguistic typologists and formal theorists. The registration of arguments both through case marking on free NPs as well as in pronominal enclitics is similar to Warlpiri but differs in its detail—particularly in the ability to register various non-core cases (e.g. locative and allative) as ‘arguments'in the pronominal complex. Within the verbal system, Ngardi is notably for a large number of verbal inflections (~20) which mark various distinctions in tense, aspect and mood, as well as associated motion and speaker-centric directionality. Ngardi exhibits a highly articulated system of complex predication, covering both complex verb and serial verb constructions. Other typologically interesting aspects of the language include the presence of dedicated apprehensional constructions and interesting interactions between negation and clausal modality. The descriptive value of this grammar is enhanced by its sustained regional comparison of the linguistic features of Ngardi with those of neighbouring Ngumpin-Yapa and Western Desert languages. This grammar (and a forthcoming dictionary) of Ngardi will be of great significance to both those few remaining Ngardi speakers as well as the next generation of Ngardi people for whom accessible published materials will be an invaluable resource.

In Anatolian Verbal Stem Formation, David Sasseville offers an extensive classification of the Luwian, Lycian and Lydian verbal stem classes. This serves as a basis for reconstructing the Proto-Luwic stage and subsequent comparison with Hittite, providing new insights into the Proto-Anatolian verbal system and by extension into the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Besides its contribution to the study of verbal morphology, the present book also provides significant insights into the philology of the Anatolian languages. The detailed analyses of the synchronic data, including a philological survey of verbal forms and paradigms for the individual stem classes, enhance our understanding of Luwian, Lycian and Lydian and thereby benefit the fields of Hittitology and other studies on the Classical period in Asia Minor.

Contemporary Phonology in Brazil is a collection of phonological studies in Brazilian Portuguese and Indigenous Brazilian Languages which are developed in Prosodic Phonology, Historical Change, Segmental Phonology, First Language Acquisition and Indigenous Languages. The Prosodic Phonology is present in the following works about Brazilian Portuguese: Accommodation of intonational patterns in short utterances: compression or truncation; The stress of non-verbs in the Multidimensional Metrical Plane and Secondary stress, vowel reduction and rhythmic implementation.The Historical Change is the subject of Sandhi: a comparative study between Archaic and Brazilian Portuguese; Clitic prosodization in Brazilian Portuguese: analysis of documents from the nineteenth century and Faithfulness demotion in the historical phonology of Portuguese: a constraint-based account. The Segmental Phonology is the base of The nominal metaphony of Brazilian Portuguese in the light of the Optimality Theory; Allomorphy in the Brazilian Portuguese verbal system and Variable aspects of Brazilian Portuguese phonology: laterals in coda position. First Language Acquisition comprises two studies: Phonological acquisition and phonological theory: formilizing patterns considering features and segments and Optimal geometries in the acquisition of Portuguese Indigenous Languages are discussed in Brazilian Indigenous Languages: a brief history and some hope for the future; The rhythm class hypothesis and Indigenous Languages and The development of creaky voice in Munduruku.

In this magnum opus, N. J. C. Kouwenberg presents a thoroughgoing, modern analysis of the Akkadian verbal system, taking into account all of the currently available evidence for the language during the course of the long period of its attestation. The book achieves this goal through two strategies: (1) to describe the Akkadian verbal system, as comprehensively as the data permit; and (2) to reconstruct its prehistory on the basis of internal evidence and reconstruction, comparison with cognate languages, and typological evidence. Akkadian has one of the longest documented histories of any language: data from nearly two-and-one-half millennia are available, even if the stream of data is sometimes interrupted and not always as copious as we would like. During the course of this history, numerous developments took place, illustrating how languages change over time and offering parallels for reconstruction of changes that occurred in poorly documented periods.As a result, this book will be of great interest, in the first place, for all students of Akkadian, both the language and the literature that is documented in that language; and in the second place, for all students of language and linguistics who are interested in the study of how languages are shaped, develop, and change during the course of a long history.

Clear. Understandable. Carefully organized. Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar by William D. Mounce is the standard textbook for colleges and seminaries. Since its initial publication in 1993 its integrated approach has helped more than 250,000 students learn New Testament Greek.The fourth edition of Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar has been updated throughout based on continuing feedback from professors, students, self-learners, and homeschoolers, making it even more effective for today's students. Other improvements have been made based on recent developments in scholarship.The key to the effectiveness of Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar in helping students learn is in how it introduces them to the language. Students learn about the features of the Greek language in a logical order, with each lesson building upon the one before it. Unnecessary obstacles that discourage students and hinder progress are removed, such as rote memorization of endless verbal paradigms. Instead, students receive encouragement along the way to assure them they are making the necessary progress. Detailed discussions are also included at key junctures to help students grasp important concepts.By the time students have worked their way through Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar they will have learned:The Greek AlphabetVocabulary for words occurring 50 times or more in the Greek New TestamentThe Greek noun systemThe Greek verbal system, including indicative and nonindicative verbs, and participlesA robust suite of learning aids is available for purchase to be used alongside the textbook to help students excel in their studies. These include a workbook, video lectures for each chapter featuring the author, flashcards keyed to vocabulary in each chapter, a laminated quick study sheet with key concepts, and audio of the vocabulary for each chapter to aid in acquisition.

Many people want to learn Greek in order to better understand the Bible, but very few are able to spend the numerous years required to master Biblical Greek, even those who have a seminary education.The get-an-A laminated sheet for Greek for the Rest of Us by William Mounce is a critical part of acquainting students with the essentials of the language and deepening their understanding of God's Word.Developed by renowned Greek teacher William Mounce, this Greek for the Rest of Us Laminated Sheet will help students: recite the Greek alphabet; read and pronounce Greek words; learn the Greek noun and verbal system; conduct Greek word studies; decipher why translations are different; see the author's flow of thought and central message; and read better commentaries.

Pomeranian is the West Germanic language spoken by European emigrants who went from Farther Pomerania (present-day Poland) to Brazil in the period 1857–1887. This language is no longer spoken in cohesive societies in Europe, but the language has survived and is in remarkably good shape on this language island in the tropical state of Espirito Santo. This monograph offers the first synchronic grammar of this language. After a historical introduction, the book offers a systematic description of its phonology, morphology and syntax. The language is contrasted with its European sisters, more particularly High German, Dutch, and Frisian. It highlights various phenomena that will presumably contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate on the Germanic verbal system. It provides new data on cluster V2, do-support, and the two infinitives. As to the infinitival syntax, the language shows remarkable parallels to the system of Frisian. As to the rich Pomeranian system of subtractive morphology, the phonological account that is offered, will be important for the ongoing discussion of the abstractness of phonological representations. Finally, Pomeranian is a welcome addition to the set of languages on which our etymological understanding of West Germanic is based.

In A Grammar of Purik Tibetan, Marius Zemp offers a comprehensive description of the phonologically archaic Tibetan variety spoken in Kargil, the capital of a region called Purik, situated in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India. This book contains the most thorough and insightful description of the verbal system of a Tibetic language yet written and will be particularly relevant for scholars studying evidentiality. It also includes highly valuable discussions of a syntactically and pragmatically well-defined class of ideophones which Zemp calls “dramatizers” and of prosody – topics which are too often neglected in language descriptions. Finally, this book goes beyond what others have done in that Purik data are used to elucidate our understanding of Classical Tibetan and its origins.

Situated at the crossroads of comparative philology, classics and general historical linguistics, this study is the first ever attempt to outline in full the developments which led from the remotest recoverable stages of the Indo-European proto-language to the complex verbal system encountered in Homer and other early Greek texts. By combining the methods of comparative and internal reconstruction with a careful examination of large collections of primary data and insights gained from the study of language change and linguistic typology, Andreas Willi uncovers the deeper reasons behind many surface irregularities and offers a new understanding of how categories such as aspect, tense and voice interact. Drawing upon evidence from all major branches of Indo-European, and providing exhaustive critical coverage of scholarly debate on the most controversial issues, this book will be an essential reference tool for anyone seeking orientation in this burgeoning but increasingly fragmented area of linguistic research.

The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of the verbal system of Bodo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India, particularly Assam. The description is primarily based on a 1.2-million-word Bodo corpus, both written and spoken, involving different genres. This is the first extensive work solely devoted to the description of the Bodo verb. The book provides a thorough description of the Bodo verb that will be comprehensive enough to be of use to Tibeto-Burmanists, on the one hand, and to language typologists, on the other. Second, it addresses certain pedagogic issues relating to the teaching of the Bodo language in schools. The book encompasses a description of verbal roots, formation of verbal stems, inflection of verbal stems, and distribution of various verb forms in different types of clauses, such as independent clauses, embedded clauses, and chained clauses. Finally, a pedagogic perspective is provided with reference to the morphosyntactic aspects of the Bodo verb. This book was the winner of the 2016 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Linguistics.

In this collective volume edited by Klaas Bentein, Mark Janse, and Jorie Soltic, some of the leading experts in the field explore variation and change in one of the core areas of Ancient Greek grammar: tense, aspect, and modality. The contributors investigate key aspects such as the existence of and competition between linguistic variants, the value of modern linguistic theory for the study of linguistic variation, and the interplay between various dimensions of variation. They focus on various stages of the Greek language (Archaic, Classical, Post-classical, and Byzantine), taking both qualitative and quantitative approaches. By doing so, they offer valuable insights in the multi-faced nature of the Greek verbal system, providing an incentive towards the further study of linguistic variation and change.

This book explores the language used by the United Nations Resolutions on the Question of Palestine. The corpus used in this analysis includes sixty-six Security Council Resolutions (2965 words) and forty General Assembly Resolutions (2529 words) from 1948 to 2006 related to the most relevant events of the conflict. In particular, the study investigates the role of the English verbal system in relation to modality in the institutional language of the United Nations and the different pragmatic purposes of its normative text types, taking into account the communicative interaction between the legal authority, the United Nations, and the addressees, Member States and the International Community. It discusses the use of prescriptive and performative verbs used to express different degrees of obligation in the United Nations documents.

The Amarna letters from Canaan offer us a unique glimpse of the historical and linguistic panorama of the Levant in the middle of the fourteenth century BCE. Their evidence regarding verbs is crucial for the historical and comparative study of the Semitic languages. Proper evaluation of this evidence requires an understanding of its scribal origin and nature. For this reason, The Verb in the Amarna Letters from Canaan addresses the historical circumstances in which the linguistic code of the letters was born and the unique characteristics of this system. The author adduces second-language acquisition as a proper framework for understanding the development of this language by scribes who were educated in centers on the cuneiform periphery. In this way, the book advances a novel interpretation: the letters testify to a scribal interlanguage that was born of the local use of cuneiform and was affected by the fossilization and transfer processes taking place in these language learners.This vision of the linguistic system of the letters as the learners'interlanguage informs the main part of the book, which is devoted to verbal morphology and semantics. The chapter on morphology offers an overview of conjugation patterns and morphemes in terms of paradigms. Employing a variationist approach, it also analyzes the bases on which the verbal forms were constructed. Next, the individual uses of each form are illustrated by numerous examples that provide readers with a basis for discovering alternative interpretations. The systemic view of each form and the various insights that permeate this book provide invaluable data for the historical and comparative study of the West Semitic verbal system, particularly of ancient Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Arabic.

Ancient Greek is commonly considered a'synthetic'or'inflectional'language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word'periphrastic'constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in ἦν γινόµεν α,'it was happening', or ἔχει ἀτιµά•sας,'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs'to be'and'to have'based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of'verbal periphrasis'and'adjectival periphrasis'from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.

François Neveu's seminal work, here available in English for the first time, enables the reader to explore the Ramesside age through an understanding of Late Egyptian. This phase corresponds to the language spoken from the 17th to the 24th dynasty, which became a written language – used for private letters, administrative, legal and literary texts, as well as some official inscriptions – during the Amarna period (circa 1364 BC). The first part of the book covers the basics of the grammar and morphology, while the second part is devoted to the syntax, covering first the verbal system and then the nominal forms. In addition there are two appendices, one devoted to interrogative constructions and another to syllabic writing. The book incorporates the most recent work on the subject and the clarity with which Neveu presents linguistic and grammatical points, and the hundreds of examples used to illustrate the grammatical presentation, makes this the ideal tool for anyone interested in learning Late Egyptian grammar in order to read and understand texts from this period.The texts also introduce the reader to the daily life of the Deir el-Medina workers, the social movements that shook the community, the conspiracies at court, the embezzlement of some priests and other prominent community figures, major historical events, as well as the stories and novels studied and read by the society of the time.

Completely revised and updated James P. Allen provides a translation of the oldest corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the six royal pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (ca. 2350–2150 BCE). Allen's revisions take into account recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar. Features: Sequential translations based on all available sources, including texts newly discovered in the last decade Texts numbered according to the most widely used numbering system with new numbers from the latest 2013 concordance Translations reflect the primarily atemporal verbal system of Old Egyptian, which conveys the timeless quality that the text's authors understood the texts to have

In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of light verb constructions in Persian. By clustering constructions based on semantic properties, she provides an insightful and more global view of a system that has been notoriously difficult to classify.Using diagrams as visual aids, Neiloufar Family takes a novel, bottom-up approach to analysing the light verb system, starting from small sets of constructions and mapping out consistent patterns. Her analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the structure of semantic spaces within the verbal system in Persian, and other languages that use light verbs. This research provides a blueprint for understanding existing verbal constructions and productively creating new ones.

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system—“suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in Poetry and Its Others, Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry's animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring poetry's vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law's rationalism. But poetry's most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, Poetry and Its Others shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.

The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries have involved much discussion on overhauling and refining a scholarly understanding of the verbal system for first-century Greek. These discussions have included advances in verbal aspect theory and other linguistic approaches to describing the grammatical phenomena of ancient languages. This volume seeks to apply some of that learning to the narrow realm of how prohibitions were constructed in the first-century Greek of the New Testament. Part 1 «The Great Prohibition Debate» seeks to demonstrate that verbal aspect theory has a better explanation than traditional Aktionsart theory for authorial choices between the negated present imperative and the negated aorist subjunctive in expressing prohibitions in the Greek New Testament. Part 2 «All the Prohibitions in the Greek NT» continues to examine prohibitions, but is more of an exercise in functional linguistics. That is, rather than apply verbal aspect theory to the grammar of prohibition constructions, Part 2 seeks only to survey the (initially surprising) wide variety of ways prohibitions can be expressed in koine Greek: more than a dozen different constructions. To do this, the NT prohibitions are grouped in their varying grammatical-syntactical and/or pragmatic constructions, all of which function – in varying degrees – in a prohibitory fashion. This taxonomy may prove to be the beginnings of further investigations into how biblical Greek communicates commands.

'Jasanoff comes up with some of the strongest arguments yet made for assuming that Indo-European languages other than Hittite and Tocharian underwent a substantial period of common development, and this needs to be fitted into any model of the dispersal of the language family.'James Clackson, Times Literary Supplement |d 05/03/2004 This book reconciles what is known of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the Indo-European parent language. For most of the twentieth century, attention focused on the peculiarities of Hittite phonology, especially the consonant h and its implications for the evolving laryngeal theory. Yet the morphological'disconnects'between Hittite and the other early languages are more profound than the phonological differences. The Hittite verbal system lacks most of the familiar tense-aspect categories of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. It also presents the novelty of the hi-conjugation, a purely formal conjugation class to which nearly half of all Hittite verbs belong. Repeated attempts to explain the hi-conjugation on the basis of the classical model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system have failed. The question is not whether the conventional picture of the parent language must be modified to account for the facts of Hittite, but how. In this outstanding book Professor Jasanoff puts forward a new and revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system that promises to have a major impact on Indo-European studies. His strikingly original synthesis, reflecting a quarter-century-long study of the problem, is the most thorough and systematic attempt thus far to bridge the gap between Hittite and the other Indo-European languages.

This book, the first of its kind, examines how the phonology and grammar of the ancient Egyptian language changed over more than three thousand years of its history, from the first appearance of written documents, c.3250 BC, to the Coptic dialects of the second century AD and later. Part One discusses phonology, working backward from the vowels and consonants of Coptic to those that can be deduced for earlier stages of the language. Part Two is devoted to grammar, including both basic components such as nouns and the complex history of the verbal system. The book thus provides both a synchronic description of the five major historical stages of ancient Egyptian and a diachronic analysis of their development and relationship.

In this book John Cook interacts with the range of approaches to the perennial questions on the Biblical Hebrew verb in a fair-minded approach. Some of his answers may appear deceptively traditional, such as his perfective-imperfective identification of the qatal–yiqtol opposition. However, his approach is distinguished from the traditional approaches by its modern linguistic foundation. One distinguishing sign is his employment of the phrase “aspect prominent” to describe the Biblical Hebrew verbal system. As with almost any of the world's verbal systems, this aspect-prominent system can express a wide range of aspectual, tensed, and modal meanings. In chap. 3, he argues that each of the forms can be semantically identified with a general meaning and that the expressions of specific aspectual, tensed, and modal meanings by each form are explicable with reference to its general meaning. After a decade of research and creative thinking, the author has come to frame his discussion not with the central question of “Tense or Aspect?” but with the question “What is the range of meaning for a given form, and what sort of contextual factors (syntagm, discourse, etc.) help us to understand this range in relation to a general meaning for the form?” In chap. 4 Cook addresses long-standing issues involving interaction between the semantics of verbal forms and their discourse pragmatic functions. He also proposes a theory of discourse modes for Biblical Hebrew. These discourse modes account for various temporal relationships that are found among successive clauses in Biblical Hebrew. Cook's work addresses old questions with a fresh approach that is sure to provoke dialogue and new research.

This work presents a concise and state‑ of‑ the‑ art grammar of the reconstructed proto‑ language of the Indo‑ European linguistic family. Drawing on a long tradition of Indo‑ European studies in Prague, it aims to provide the Czech reader with the necessary background for the study of the older Indo‑ European languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic, Old Irish, Hittite or Old Church Slavonic in a comparative perspective, while at the same time offering an explanation for the present state of the Czech language. Though succinct, it covers all the crucial topics, either long settled or still disputed, of the field of the Proto‑ Indo‑ European grammar. In the chapter on PIE phonology, such topics are covered as the satem‑centum isogloss, the laryngeal theory, the evolution of the system in the various branches of Indo‑ European. Sound laws, such as Grassmann's, Brugmann's or Grimm's are explained and exemplified. In order to facilitate comprehension, parallels are given in modern Czech where possible and phonetic description included. The chapter on morphophonology covers, among other important phenomena, the function and origin of the PIE vowel‑ gradation, the so‑ called ablaut, one of the main vehicles of derivation in the older daughter languages and the proto‑ language itself – still traceable in a number of forms in Czech. The chapter on PIE morphology outlines the various problems of analysis and description involved in a reconstructed language, quite different in most respect from any of the modern IE languages: the problem of word classes, the categories and their relations both synchronic and diachronic, inflection and internal derivation, typological parallels, and some of the more prominent competing theories of their function and evolution. The nomina (nouns and adjectives) are described first along the grammatical categories (number, gender, case) and next formally (the various stems and their role in derivation). Again, Czech forms are provided for comparison where relevant and extant. Paradigms are given in full for some of the most important stems. Pronominal morphology is compared to the structure of the nominal forms and the relevant differences pointed out. Numerals are treated in short. The intricacies of the PIE verbal system are treated from the aspectual perspective of perfectivity, with clear parallels in Czech. The genesis of the PIE verbal morphology and categories is given background in grammaticalisation and the synchronic structure of the verbal form explained as the result of subsequent grammaticalisation stages, again with parallels in Czech or elsewhere, where possible. Categories foreign to Czech speakers, such as the imperfect, aorist, perfect and optative are given special attention. Together with the verb, the evolving system of verbal nominals (participles) is outlined, with reference to Czech and other IE languages. PIE particles, the source of Czech prepositions, adverbs (partly), conjunctions, and particles are treated as a single word class providing all the services required of these separate categories in the daughter languages. PIE syntax, much as it is difficult to reconstruct, is also treated briefly. Appended to the grammar is a dictionary of some seven hundred PIE roots or words present in Czech in some form or another (either inherited or borrowed), which should provide the lexical material needed to appreciate the part on phonology and morphophonology. The bibliography serves as a guideline for further reading in the relevant topics of language change, reconstruction, and Indo‑ European linguistics.

In The Subjunctive Mood in Arabic Grammatical Thought Arik Sadan outlines the grammatical theories on the naṣb (subjunctive mood) in Classical Arabic. Examining over 160 treatises written by 85 grammarians, lexicographers and Qurʾān commentators, the author defines and characterizes the opinions of medieval Arab grammarians concerning this mood in the verbal system of Classical Arabic. Special attention is given to the prominent early grammarians Sībawayhi (d. ca. 180/796) and al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/822), who represent the Schools of al-Baṣra and al-Kūfa respectively.The analysis of the grammarians'views enables the author to draw several important conclusions and hypotheses on the syntactic environments of the subjunctive mood, the dialectal differences relating to its employment and the historical changes and developments it underwent.

The present study investigates the function of the verbal forms in biblical Hebrew narrative, using the Joseph story (Gen. 37-50) as a corpus. It demonstrates how the'tense','aspect'and'sequentiality'function as factors in the choice of the verbal forms in both main clauses and subordinate clauses. The tense distinction past vs. non-past basically works as a factor in the choice of the freestanding conjugations, except for the stative verb, the verb with a stative sense, the passive construction, or the performative utterance. Moreover, the traditional aspectual opposition complete vs. incomplete also corresponds to QATAL (•qátal) vs. YIQTOL (•yaqtúlu). There appears to be not much difference between these oppositions in describing the function of the above verbal forms (esp. ch.2). Furthermore, the opposition non-sequential vs. sequential discriminates functionally between YIQTOL and (w,) QATAL (•qatál) in the non-past context, between QATAL and (waY)YIQTOL (•yáqtul) in the past context, and between the IMPV (coh., impv. and juss.) forms and (w,) QATAL (•qatál) in the hortatory context. In each context the former functions as a non-sequential form and the latter as a sequential form. The phenomenon of sequentiality is purely syntactical. It controls the flow of the story as a discourse function; the non-sequential form stops the flow (i.e. stand still), while the sequential form lets the story flow on. A thread of discourse is usually traced by sequential forms, but it may include non-sequential forms to signal the difference of discourse level or a discourse boundary. Or each form could play an opposite role to produce special literary effects (chs. 3-7). Finally, a verbal form in the subordinate clause is chosen not from the viewpoint of the deictic centre of the narrator, but from that of the immediate participant in the main clause (ch. 8).

This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 7th Chronos colloquium in Antwerp (2006), which deal with the expression of modality (in a wide sense), by modal and semi-modal verbs (in Germanic and Romance languages), on the one hand, and by other markers (in languages like Turkish, Tibetan and Japanese), on the other. The Antwerp edition's special conference topic was the interaction between tense and modality, of which some of the papers collected in this volume also testify. The volume covers a wide range of languages and topics. Specific topics include: the distinction between root and epistemic modality and its interaction with tense and counterfactuality; epistemic deve and dovrebbe in Italian; semi-modals in German; the interpretation of epistemic past modals in English and Spanish; the interface between Turkish ‘almost'adverbs and the Turkish verbal system; the meaning of epistemic endings in Spoken Standard Tibetan; Korean ‘evidential'markers teiru and ta and so-called fake past sentences in Japanese.

Spatial working memory is the ability to remember the location in which something is perceived, and in addition, the ability to recall a series of visited locations. In this book, top researchers in the domain of spatial working memory review and discuss findings about the processes and memory structures which underlie the ability to store and use spatial information.The first part of the book provides an examination of the working memory system, looking at the behavioural and neural processes involved in working with (visuo-) spatial information and how these can constrain the hypotheses that are generated. It also addresses methodological questions, for example looking at how the use of the appropriate method can ensure that the observed data are as informative as possible about the underlying structures. The remaining chapters focus on specific problems to do with spatial working memory such as how the working memory system can handle individual differences in representing spatial interactions, how the visuospatial system can support and interact with the environment and the verbal system, and how understanding these systems can shed light on the development of particular skills in children with developmental disorders.With contributions from leading international figures in the field, this book is the first to address the topic of spatial working memory from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. As such, it will serve as an indispensible tool for students and researchers interested in working memory.