Imperatives and Commands

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-920790-9
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 520 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 942 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory

This is the first cross-linguistic study of imperatives, and commands of other kinds, across the world's languages. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. The author discusses the role imperatives and commands play in human cognition and how they are deployed in different cultures, and in doing so offers fresh insights on patterns of human interaction and
communcation.

Alexandra Aikhenvald examines the ways of framing commands, or command strategies, in languages that do not have special imperative forms. She analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of positive and negative imperatives and shows how these correlate with categories such as tense, information source, and politeness. She looks at the relation of command pragmatics to cultural practices, assessing, for example, the basis for Margaret Mead's assumption that the harsher the people the more
frequently they use imperatives. Professor Aikhenvald covers a wide range of language families, including many relatively neglected examples from North America, Amazonia, and New Guinea. The book is accompanied by illustrations of some conventional command signs.

Written and presented with the author's characteristic clarity, this book will be welcomed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. It will appeal to social and cultural anthropologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.

Aikhenvald, A. Iu

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1: Setting the Scene
2: Imperatives Worldwide
3: How Imperatives are Special
4: Imperatives and Other Grammatical Categories
5: Negative Imperatives
6: Imperatives and Their Meanings
7: Imperatives Which do not Command
8: Imperatives in Disguise
9: Imperatives we Live by
10: Where do Imperatives Come From?
11: What can we Conclude?
Appendix
References
Index of Authors
Index of Languages, Linguistic Families, and Areas
Index of Subjects

Über Autor(innen)

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last
speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages.

Her lengthy grammar, The Manambu Language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, was published by OUP in 2008. Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause
Linking, appeared in 2009.