SubjectsLinguistics / Languages of North America

A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America

Marcin Kilarski

The languages indigenous to North America are characterized by a remarkable genetic and typological diversity. Based on the premise that linguistic examples play a key role in the origin and transmission of ideas within linguistics and across disciplines, this book examines the history of… read more

[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 129] 2021. xiv, 443 pp.

Nominalization in Languages of the Americas

Edited by Roberto Zariquiey, Masayoshi Shibatani and David W. Fleck

Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas, yet they have not been… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 124] 2019. vii, 662 pp.

Language Contact and Change in the Americas: Studies in honor of Marianne Mithun

Edited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Diane M. Hintz and Carmen Dagostino

This unique collection of articles in honor of Marianne Mithun represents the very latest in research on language contact and language change in the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The book aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into how and why languages change, especially… read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 173] 2016. viii, 416 pp.

Ute Dictionary

T. Givón

This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 15] 2016. xiv, 373 pp.

The Acquisition of Inflection in Q’anjob’al Maya

Pedro Mateo Pedro

Most studies on the acquisition of verbal inflection have examined languages with a single verb suffix. This book offers a study on the acquisition of verb inflections in Q’anjob’al Maya. Q’anjob’al has separate inflections for aspect, subject and object agreement, and status suffixes. The subject… read more

[Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 14] 2015. xiii, 144 pp.

Valence Changes in Zapotec: Synchrony, diachrony, typology

Edited by Natalie Operstein and Aaron Huey Sonnenschein

Zapotec languages present a wide range of lexical, morphological, phonological, and syntactic means of indicating valence changes. Despite their significant theoretical interest, detailed descriptions of valence-changing phenomena in Zapotec are rare, comparative studies are practically… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 110] 2015. xiii, 385 pp.

Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference: The story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands

Danny Law

This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the… read more

[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 328] 2014. xi, 206 pp.

Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas

Roberto A. Valdeón

Two are the starting points of this book. On the one hand, the use of Doña Marina/La Malinche as a symbol of the violation of the Americas by the Spanish conquerors as well as a metaphor of her treason to the Mexican people. On the other, the role of the translations of Bartolomé de las Casas’s… read more

[Benjamins Translation Library, 113] 2014. xii, 272 pp.

The Persistence of Language: Constructing and confronting the past and present in the voices of Jane H. Hill

Edited by Shannon T. Bischoff, Deborah Cole, Amy V. Fountain and Mizuki Miyashita

This edited collection presents two sets of interdisciplinary conversations connecting theoretical, methodological, and ideological issues in the study of language. In the first section, Approaches to the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas, the authors connect historical,… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 8] 2013. xxx, 440 pp.

Ute Texts

Compiled and edited by T. Givón

This second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain, flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 7] 2013. xvi, 333 pp.

From Space to Time: A cognitive analysis of the Cora locative system and its temporal extensions

Eugene H. Casad

Eugene Casad’s posthumous monograph is an in-depth study of the TIME IS SPACE metaphor in Cora – an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the state of Nayarit, Mexico – within the framework of Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. The author provides an introduction to Cora speakers and their history, and… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 39] 2012. xxvii, 263 pp.

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A typological overview

Edited by Bernard Comrie and Zarina Estrada-Fernández

Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 102] 2012. xiii, 307 pp.

Ute Reference Grammar

T. Givón

Ute is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch, currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America, Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically,… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 3] 2011. xxiii, 441 pp.

“And he knew our language”: Missionary Linguistics on the Pacific Northwest Coast

Marcus Tomalin

This ambitious and ground-breaking book examines the linguistic studies produced by missionaries based on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America (and particularly Haida Gwaii) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of unpublished archival materials, the… read more

[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 116] 2011. xi, 203 pp. | open access

Variations on Polysynthesis: The Eskaleut languages

Edited by Marc-Antoine Mahieu and Nicole Tersis

This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of the book is to situate the… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 86] 2009. ix, 312 pp.

Deixis and Alignment: Inverse systems in indigenous languages of the Americas

Fernando Zúñiga

This book proposes a notion of inverse that differs from two widespread positions found in descriptive and typological studies (one of them restrictive and structure-oriented, the other broad and function-centered). This third stance put forward here takes both grammar and pragmatic functions into… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 70] 2006. xii, 309 pp.

Athabaskan Prosody

Edited by Sharon Hargus and Keren Rice

This collection of articles on stress and tone in various Athabaskan languages will interest theoretical linguists and historically oriented linguists alike. The volume brings to light new data on the phonetics and/or phonology of prosody (stress, tone, intonation) in various Athabaskan languages,… read more

[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 269] 2005. xii, 432 pp.

Postvelar Harmony

Kimary N. Shahin

This book examines the formal bases of postvelar harmony and its crosslinguistic variation. It is of interest especially to phonologists concerned with segmental harmony and its explanation within Optimality Theory. Postvelar harmony in two unrelated languages, Palestinian Arabic and St'át'imcets… read more

[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 225] 2002. viii, 344 pp.

And Along Came Boas: Continuity and revolution in Americanist anthropology

Regna Darnell

The advent of Franz Boas on the North American scene irrevocably redirected the course of Americanist anthropology. This volume documents the revolutionary character of the theoretical and methodological standpoint introduced by Boas and his first generation of students, among whom linguist Edward… read more

[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 86] 1998. xviii, 333 pp.

Aspects of Argument Structure Acquisition in Inuktitut

Shanley E.M. Allen

This book discusses the first language acquisition of three morphosyntactic mechanisms of transitivity alternation in arctic Quebec Inuktitut. Data derive from naturalistic longitudinal spontaneous speech samples collected over a nine-month period from four Inuit children. Both basic and advanced… read more

[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 13] 1996. xvi, 248 pp.

A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon

Compiled by Roy Albert and David L. Shaul

A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon is a lexical research tool for persons interested in the Hopi language. An effort has been made to include the most frequent forms of basic roots. The work is designed to serve as wide-ranging an audience as possible: Hopi speakers as well as those not fluent in… read more

[Not in series, 19] 1985. vii, 204 pp.