Phoronyms: Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction (Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics) - Hardcover

Beckwith, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1433101394 ISBN 13: 9781433101397

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2007

Synopsis

This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as «cup» in «a cup of tea», classifiers such as «head» in «ten head of cattle», and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components – which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender – and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher I. Beckwith is Distinguished Professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the recipient of a MacArthur Award. He has published extensively on Central Eurasian history and linguistics, including The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages (Princeton,1987/ revised ed. 1993), Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages (Brill, 2002), Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II (Brill, 2005), Koguryo, Language of Japan's Continental Relatives (Brill 2004/ 2nd ed. 2007), Phoronyms: Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction (Peter Lang, 2007), Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, 2009), Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton, 2012), and Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2015).

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1433101394
• ISBN 13: 9781433101397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 223