Synopses & Reviews
Meanings of cultural importance are found not only in words but also in the very grammar of a language. This exciting collection presents eleven original studies of the relationship between grammar, culture, and cognition, with data from languages and cultures from around the world. Contributors discuss a wide variety of grammatical phenomena. This book shows that the study of culture can help to understand how and why languages differ in the ways they do.
About the Author
N. J. Enfield is a staff member in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. His work in semantic and grammatical description, contact and areal linguistics, gesture, and linguistic anthropology is based upon ongoing fieldwork in mainland Southeast Asia.
Table of Contents
Part I: Ethnosyntax: Theory and Scope 1. Ethnosyntax: Introduction, N. J. Enfield
2. Syntactic Enquiry as a Cultural Activity, Anthony V. N. Diller and Wilaiwan Khanittanan
3. Ethnosyntax, Ethnopragmatics, Sign-Functions, and Culture, Cliff Goddard
4. Culture, Cognition, and the Grammar of 'Give' Clauses, John Newman
Part II: Culture, Semantics, and Grammar
5. Masculine and Feminine in the Northern Iroquoian Languages, Wallace Chafe
6. Using He and She for Inanimate Referents in English: Questions of Grammar and World View, Andrew Pawley
7. A Study in Unified Diversity: English and Mixtec Locatives, Ronald W. Langacker
8. English Causative Constructions in an Ethnosyntactic Perspective: Focusing on 'LET', Anna Wierzbicka
Part III: Culture, Pragmatics, and Grammaticalisation
9. Changes within Pennsylvania German Grammar as Enactments of Anabaptist World View, Kate Burridge
10. Cultural Logic and Syntactic Productivity: Associated Posture Constructions in Lao, N. J. Enfield
11. Aspects of Ku Waru Ethnosyntax and Social Life, Alan Rumsey
12. From Common Ground to Syntactic Construction: Associated Path in Warlpiri, Jane Simpson