This book analyzes the linguistic diversity of South America based on approaches deeply rooted in the tradition of formal grammar. The chapters brought together in this contributed volume consider native languages all kinds of languages used in the region, including sign languages, indigenous languages and the romance languages (Portuguese and Spanish) originally introduced by European colonizers which underwent processes of transformation giving rise to new, local grammars. One fourth of the language families of the world are located in South America, but the majority of languages in the region are still understudied and out of the radar of theoretical linguistics mostly because their grammars are not well-known by international researchers. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together studies rooted in the formal grammar approach first developed by Noam Chomsky, which sees language not only as mere corpora attested in oral and written production, but also as expressions of systems of thought and language production which are essential parts of human cognition. The book is divided in three parts – sign languages, romance languages and indigenous languages –, and brings together studies of the following South American languages: Brazilian Sign Language (Libras - Língua Brasileira de Sinais) Argentinian Sign Language (LSA - Lengua de Señas Argentina) Peruvian Sign Language (LSP- Lengua de Señas Peruana) Brazilian Portuguese Chilean and Argentinian Spanish Quechua Paraguayan Guarani A’ingae Macro-Jê languages Formal Approaches to the Languages of South America will be an invaluable resource both for theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists by providing access to top quality research on understudied languages and enabling these languages to be incorporated into comparative studies that can contribute to advance the knowledge of general principles governing all human languages.

The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide is a thorough guide to the indigenous languages of this part of the world. With more than a third of the linguistic diversity of the world (in terms of language families and isolates), South American languages contribute new findings in most areas of linguistics. Though formerly one of the linguistically least known areas of the world, extensive descriptive and historical linguistic research in recent years has expanded knowledge greatly. These advances are represented in this volume in indepth treatments by the foremost scholars in the field, with chapters on the history of investigation, language classification, language endangerment, language contact, typology, phonology and phonetics, and on major language families and regions of South America.

Data Representativity and Granularity in Spanish Syntax focuses on the dialogue between Generative Grammar, Variationism, and experimental linguistics with a unique emphasis on Spanish linguistics. Combining formal syntax and empirical data collection, this volume analyzes and compares various data collection methods in syntactic theory, and examines a wide variety of approaches to gain novel insight in this emerging area. Through the case study of subject properties in Spanish, with an emphasis on how differences in data collection and data analysis standards may shape our perception of the object of study, this book addresses the following questions: (a) How do the data gathered through the standard methodology in each discipline diverge (if at all) and why? and (b) What kind of research questions can be answered with the standard methodology in each field? The volume argues for methodological crosspollination to avoid forcing data to conform to field-specific expectations and to appreciate language variation for what it has to tell us about linguistic theory, marrying the goals of Generative Grammar with data-driven research. This is an essential resource for researchers in the area of formal and generative syntax, linguists with an interest in data collection standard in syntax, and graduate or advanced undergraduate students in the field of Spanish linguistics.

Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language in the world, and due to recent interest in comparative syntax, the literature on its syntax has increased exponentially, resulting in exciting discoveries of a range of aspects that have hitherto been overlooked. This book provides a theoretically grounded overview of the major syntactic properties of Portuguese, focusing on the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese. It shows from a theoretical point of view how different syntactic properties are interconnected by comparing and contrasting the variances between pronominal and agreement systems, null subjects, null complements, and word order. It also highlights how small differences in the specification of syntactic properties may yield quite different dialects. It introduces key theoretical points without technical jargon, making the content accessible to specialist and non-specialists alike. It is essential reading for both academic researchers and students of Portuguese language, comparative syntax, Romance linguistics, and theoretical syntax.

This volume contains functional approaches to the description of language and culture, and language and cultural change. The approaches taken by the authors range from cognitive approaches including Stratificational grammar to more socially oriented ones including Systemic Functional linguistics. The volume is organized into two sections. The first section 'Functional Approaches to the Structure of Language: Theory and Practice' starts with contributions developing a Stratificational model; these are followed by contributions focusing on some related functional model of language; and by articles describing some particular set of language phenomena.In the second section 'Functional Approaches to the History of Language and Linguistics' general studies of language change are addressed first; a second group of contributions examines language change, lexicon and culture; and the last cluster of contributions treats the history of linguistics and culture.

The International Conference on Historical Linguistics has always been a forum that reflects the general state of the art in the field, and the 2009 edition, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, fully allows the conclusion that the field has been thriving over the years. The studies presented in this volume are an expression of ongoing theoretical discussions as well as new analytical approaches to the study of issues concerning language change. Taken together, they reflect some of the current challenges in the field, as well as the opportunities offered by judicious use of theoretical models and careful corpus-based work. The volume's contributions are organized under the following headings: I. General and Specific Issues of Language Change, II. Linguistic Variation and Change in Germanic, III. Linguistic Variation and Change in Greek, and IV. Linguistic Change in Romance.

The first volume to offer a thorough and systematic account of evidentiality and the expression of information source, Illustrated with extensive data from a range of typologically diverse languages, Introductory chapter offers practical advice for fieldworkers investigating evidentially, Interdisciplinary in nature with insights from typology, semantics, pragmatics, language description, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics Book jacket.

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.

In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.