Claire Bowern

The Bardi language is currently spoken by fewer than 10 people. The language is a member of the Nyulnyulan family, a small non-Pama-Nyungan family in northwest Australia. This book is a reference grammar of the language. The 16 chapters include information on phonetics and phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, and syntax, as well as an ethnographic sketch of traditional life. A selection of texts is also included. It is the first published full study of a Nyulnyulan language.

There are few published grammars of the languages of the Admiralty Islands. This work makes available valuable data compiled by Po Minis and the New Britain missionary P. Josef Meier for the Titan language. Meier published seventy-five texts in Titan (the corpus is about 25,000 words) in the journal Anthropos between 1906 and 1909 and an addendum in 1912. Stories contain brief information about the speakers and are glossed word-for-word in German and occasionally Latin. Sivisa Titan is divided into three sections. The first is a sketch grammar based entirely on the texts collected by Meier and published by him in Anthropos. Part Two is a wordlist compiled from the texts with an English-Titan reversal. Part Three contains the texts published by Meier. The present work provides English glosses based on Meier's German ones and free translations, which are not included by Meier. Sivisa Titan will be an invaluable addition to our knowledge about the Admiralty Islands subgroup of Oceania. It also illustrates the importance of ethnographic texts collected in the local language and possibilities for analysis based on materials originally gathered for another purpose.

All languages change, just as other aspects of human society are constantly changing. This book is an introduction to the concepts and techniques of diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time. It covers all themajor areas of historical linguistics, presenting concepts in a clear and concise way. Examples are given from a wide range of languages, with special emphasis on the languages of Australia and the Pacific. While the needs of undergraduate students of linguistics have been kept firmly in mind, the book will also be of interest to the general reader seeking to understand langauge and language change. For this fourth edition, a number of new sections have been written, including many new problems and several datasets. Existing materials have been supplemented with new sections on grammaticalization, tonogenesis, morphological change, and using statistical methods in language classification.

This is a practical guide to all aspects of linguistic fieldwork. It not only discusses techniques for working on the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse of an undescribed language, but also considers field technology, grant application preparation, ethical research methods and problems which might arise when in the field.

This is a practical guide to all aspects of linguistic fieldwork. It not only discusses techniques for working on the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse of an undescribed language, but also considers field technology, grant application preparation, ethical research methods and problems which might arise when in the field.