This book presents the first detailed sketch grammar of Nhanda, a Pama-Nyungan language of the central coast of Western Australia presently on the verge of extinction. This language was once spoken al
Drawing on some 20 years of cross-linguistic research in phonology, Blevins (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) presents a new synthesis of historical and non-historical acco
This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. B
Evolutionary Phonology is a theory of sound patterns which synthesizes results in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonological theory. In this book, Juliette Blevins explores the nature of sounds patterns and sound change in human language over the past 7000–8000 years, the time depth for which the comparative method is reasonably reliable. This book presents an approach to the problem of how genetically unrelated languages, from families as far apart as Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European, can often show similar sound patterns, and also tackles the converse problem of why there are notable exceptions to most of the patterns that are often regarded as universal tendencies or constraints. It argues that in both cases, a formal model of sound change that integrates phonetic variation and patterns of misperception can account for attested sound systems without reference to markedness or naturalness within the synchronic grammar.
In this book, leading researchers in morphology, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics address central questions about the form and acquisition of analogy in