This book is a collection of 15 narratives in Hewramî. It offers a unique window into the life of Hewramî speakers, including their oral and social history, social relations, recollections of past life, and storytelling traditions. The stories were told by five narrators. All the stories have been transcribed, translated, annotated, and analysed. The volume contains an introduction that provides an overview of the language and speech community. The texts are presented in two formats: as paral

The Jarawaras are a small Amerindian community in lowland Amazonia, in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Their language is one of half a dozen languages of the Arawan family. Yowao and Siko, both now deceased, were elderly Jarawara storytellers. Their stories are valuable from several points of view. First is their literary value -- some of the stories are quite humorous, for example. Secondly, they are a window into the life of the Jarawaras -- their social relations, history, and traditional reli

Japhug is a vulnerable Gyalrongic language, which belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. It is spoken by several thousand speakers in Mbarkham county, Rngaba district, Sichuan province, China. This grammar is the result of nearly 20 years of fieldwork on one variety of Japhug, based on a corpus of narratives and conversations, a large part of which is available from the Pangloss Collection. It covers the whole grammar of the language, and the text examples provide a unique insight

Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the i

This book presents the first grammatical description of Andakí, an extinct language and presumed isolate once spoken in southern Colombia. Written in an accessible style, this book is valuable to both linguists and scholars of South American indigenous cultures. Although Andakí was documented to some extent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, its grammar has never been systematically analyzed until now. Drawing on sometimes fragmentary data, all made available in an online database, the b

Multilingualism is the normal condition for contemporary as well as historical human societies. However, European nation-state building has led to a strong “monolingual habitus” that constructs a community of monolingual speakers as bearers of a nation. This erases or exoticises multilinguistic practices and excludes multilingual speakers. The effects of this exclusion are visible in the public discourse on multilingual speakers, where we find a widespread “Othering” of multilingual speakers, un

This volume contains a selection of papers that were originally presented at a workshop "Cross-disciplinary approaches to Information Structure in African languages", held in Porto-Novo, Benin in 2022. Eight papers explore information structure in Niger-Congo languages from different linguistic angles: phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics. The papers address a range of topics in different Niger- Congo languages from both junior and senior scholars in the field of linguistics, reflecting bo

Humans are confronted everyday with an influx of sounds coming from several sources. In a given auditory environment, some of the sound events might be unexpected, rare, or new. Our cognitive system has the ability to detect such sounds, and consequently activate an attention orienting response. This book provides an in-depth investigation of the interplay between prosody and attention orienting during online speech processing by using two complementary experimental methods, electrophysiology

Locative and existential predications are fundamental linguistic constructions that exhibit significant formal overlap while serving distinct communicative functions. Locative clauses typically anchor a definite referent to a spatial context, whereas existential clauses introduce new, often indefinite, referents into discourse. Despite their central role in syntactic and typological research, the cross-linguistic diversity of these predications remains largely underexplored. This collective volu

With the exception of English and its varieties, all Present-Day Germanic languages display some kind of verb-second (V2) rule, according to which the finite verbal form has to be put in the second position of the clause in declarative utterances. But even within the Germanic domain, the exact contours of the V2 rule vary strongly in time and space. Above all, the so-called bottleneck demanding that one and only one constituent be placed before the finite verb is not equally respected in all Ger