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The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, this book shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. This book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition. The book applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. The author's holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children's lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, the author expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages' variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, the author argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one's native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

Five Germanic languages--Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese--along with two Finno-Ugric languages--Finnish and Sami--have lived in neighboring territory in the North for millennia. Though the first five languages belong to a different linguistic family than the second two, their long life together has influenced them all in sometimes surprising ways. This book investigates archaeological, cultural, and genetic evidence from deep history, beginning in the immediate post-Ice Age, to reveal where the languages and their speakers came from. The book's focus is on the crucial intersections, sometimes actually collisions, among the seven languages and their speakers. The conclusion reports on the languages of Scandinavia today and some linguistic trends that will likely affect their future.

Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, have revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories. This book argues that it’s time to revisit our conventional assumptions and reconsider our foundational questions: What exactly is a linguistic category? What kinds of categories to labels such as “subjunctive,” “imperative,” “future,” and “modality” truly refer to? In short, how categorical are categories? Current literature assumes a straightforward link between grammatical category and semantic function, and descriptions of well-studied languages have cultivated a sense of predictability in patterns over time. However, this predictability and stability vanish in the study of lesser-known patterns and languages. The ten provocative essays gathered here present fascinating cutting-edge research demonstrating that the traditional grammatical distinctions are ultimately fluid, and perhaps even illusory. Developing groundbreaking and highly original theories, the contributors in this volume seek to unravel more general, fundamental principles of TAM that can help us better understand the nature of linguistic representations.

Within the last 40 years the field of phonology has undergone several important theoretical shifts with regard to phonological representation that have now become part of standard practice in the field. The two shifts that will be taken up in this volume have some properties in common—i) both have had the effect of taking phonological analysis “off the page”, that made it necessary to think of phonology in multi-dimensional space, and ii) John Goldsmith has been a major force in bringing about these changes. The first section of this volume has to do with a radical elaboration of the abstract domains (or units of analysis) that come under the purview of phonology, along with a more multi-dimensional approach to considering their role in the system. Autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976) and feature geometry (Clements, 1981; Sagey, 1986) demonstrated this multidimensionality of phonological representation. The second radical shift that occurred in the mid-1990s has to do with machine learning and the computational techniques that phonologists had begun using to analyze large amounts of data. The empiricist view to linguistics (Goldsmith 2015) makes us rethink what doing linguistics really means. With the ability to employ computational tools that allow for the analysis of larger and larger data sets, the field has shifted from being satisfied to look for key examples that demonstrate a particular generalization to striving for statistical generalizations across large corpora of relevant data.