The Handbook of the Austroasiatic Languages is the first comprehensive reference work on this important language family of South and Southeast Asia. Austroasiatic languages are spoken by more than 100 million people, from central India to Vietnam, from Malaysia to Southern China, including national language Cambodian and Vietnamese, and more than 130 minority communities, large and small. The handbook comprises two parts, Overviews and Grammar Sketches: Part 1) The overview chapters cover typology, classification, historical reconstruction, plus a special overview of the Munda languages. Part 2) Some 27 scholars present grammar sketches of 21 languages, representing 12 of the 13 branches. The sketches are carefully prepared according to the editors’ unifying typological approach, ensuring analytical and notational comparability throughout.

The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

This edited volume on Munda linguistics makes an important contribution in terms of analysing and demonstrating key issues such as Proto-Munda reconstruction, migration of Munda language speakers, and synchronic linguistic issues in Munda languages spoken in India. The contributions here reflect the diverse range of scholarship on Munda languages which combines empirical and theoretical discussion; the volume will be an extremely useful reference after a long gap in research on Munda languages and it will be useful not only for scholars interested in research on Munda languages, but also to those interested in typological studies and in documentary and field linguistics more generally. Moreover, this will be a major contribution to the understanding of the cultural and linguistic dynamics of South Asia as a linguistic area.

This volume focuses on the theoretical and analytical challenges that languages with complex morphologies pose for the theory and typology of word-level prosodic phenomena. The morphological complexity and phonological length that are characteristic of words in these languages make them a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of prominence. The first three chapters in the volume explore general theoretical issues pertaining to word prominence in synthetic languages, including the issue of 'wordhood' and the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues with delineating word-level prominence and the higher-level prosodic phenomena in these languages. These are followed by a series of case studies on stress, accent, and tone in a geographically and genetically diverse set of languages with highly synthetic morphologies including languages of the Americas, Europe and Asia, and Australia. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic insights. It will be of interest not only to phonologists and morphologists, but to all those interested in the typological and theoretical issues relating to polysynthetic languages.

Caijia, [meŋ21ni33ŋoŋ33] ‘Caijia speech’, is an endangered language in the Sino-Tibetan family with less than 1000 speakers in Hezhang and Weining counties in northwest in Guizhou Province in Southwest China. Its sub-classification remains unclear. It was almost four decades ago when the Caijia language was officially reported for the first time in 1982 by the Language Team of Bureau of Ethnic Identification in Bijie, yet this language has nevertheless remained neither well-described nor studied. This book, a linguistic description of the Xingfa variety of Caijia based on the fieldwork data in Xingfa township of Hezhang county, is the first reference grammar of the Caijia language, covering its sound system, word formation, parts of speech and syntactic structures in fifteen chapters. Being analytic, Caijia presents many common grammatical features attested in East and Southeast Asian languages, for example, compounds, quadrisyllabic idiomatic expressions or elaborate expressions, lack of inflection, a classifier system, a strong relationship between nominalization and relativization, pro-drop and grammaticalization of verbs. Moreover, Caijia shares more similarities with Sinitic languages. Apart from these common areal features, this book will also reveal some special features of Caijia.

Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective elevates historical morpho-syntax to a research priority in the field of Southeast Asian language history, transcending the traditional focus on phonology and lexicon. The volume contains eleven chapters covering a wide range of aspects of diachronic Austroasiatic syntax, most of which contain new hypotheses, and several address topics that have never been dealt with before in print, such as clause structure and word order in the proto-language, and reconstruction of Munda morphology successfully integrating it into Austroasiatic language history. Also included is a list of proto-AA grammatical words with evaluative and contextualizing comments.

This volume is the first extensive and reliable grammatical description of any traditional language of the Great Andamanese family. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and its phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The grammar is accompanied by an online appendix that provides a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman's Dialogues. Raoul Zamponi and Bernard Comrie's Grammar of Akabea offers a unique insight into the culture, history, and prehistory of the Andaman Islands, and also broadens our understanding of the human capacity for language. It highlights the typologically interesting and cross-linguistically rare traits of the language, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The project at last makes this valuable evidence accessible both to linguists and to interested scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and genetics.

This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

Causatives and Causation is the first comprehensive study of causative constructions found in the world's languages. This important new research, based on a data base of more than 600 languages, not only investigates fully the richness and variety of causative types, but also presents an alternative perspective to the traditional typological approach. The new typology enables a better understanding of how the human mind cognizes causation and how this is reflected in language. Causatives and Causation is also an important attempt to integrate language typology with diachrony by constructing a diachronic model of causative affixes on the basis of this new typology. Drawing on the theoretical insight of Role and Reference Grammar, this book provides a case study of the causative constructions in Korean, providing additional support for both the proposed new typology and the diachronic model. It also examines the pragmatic foundations of causatives, an important but previously unexplored area of study.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009) Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters aim to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. The book also surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics.