Tucker Childs

• Portland State University

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997)

This paper examines the contradictory demands of using language expressively and still qualifying as language, proposing a functional explanation for the form of words in a linguistic word category. Being expressive requires expending more energy, emitting a more robust signal to convey additional information about the speaker, the perception of an...

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language's sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and th...

This paper presents some of the issues involved in preparing a bilingual dictionary for Kisi, an underdocumented language spoken in West Africa. Because the language possesses little in the way of literacy materials, fundamental issues as to orthography, word division, etc., had to be considered. In addition, no grammar of the language (or its clos...

The interaction between speakers of Atlantic languages and speakers of Mande languages has pointed in one direction as to (linguistic) influence, namely, from Mande to Atlantic. Why this is true can be explained with reference to historical and cultural factors. Although there are a few exceptions to this directionality, the presumed exceptions act...

G Tucker Childs received his Ph.D. from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1988, and has additional degrees from Stanford, Trinity College (Dublin), and the University of Virginia. He has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied...

G. Tucker Childs received his Ph.D. from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1988, and has additional degrees from Stanford, Trinity College (Dublin), and the University of Virginia. He has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied...

G Tucker Childs received his Ph.D. from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1988, and has additional degrees from Stanford, Trinity College (Dublin) and the University of Virginia. He has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied L...

G Tucker Childs received his Ph.D. from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1988, and has additional degrees from Stanford, Trinity College (Dublin), and the University of Virginia. He has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied...

G Tucker Childs received his Ph.D. from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1988, and has additional degrees from Stanford, Trinity College (Dublin), and the University of Virginia. He has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied...

BOOK NOTICES 689 feel somewhat uneasy with the term TRANSLATION UNIVERSAL and suggest less exclusive alternatives, such as ‘law’, ‘regularity’, or ‘tendency’. This in no way diminishes the value of this collection, which offers an interesting and rewarding insight into this young discipline. [LEA CYRUS, Mu¨nster University.] Creole formation as lan...

As the largest language phylum in the world and the most geographically widespread (Williamson & Blench 2000), Niger-Congo understandably exhibits some variation at all grammatical levels. Basic word order stands as no exception to this generalization, and there have been partisans for both an SOY and an SVO reconstructed word order. Gensler 1994 a...

1. Introduction (by Niemeier, Susanne) 2. I. Theoretical issues in the analysis of emotion 3. Is the "psychologic" of trust universal? (by Smedslund, Jan) 4. The expressive function of language: Towards a cognitive semantic approach (by Foolen, Ad) 5. Toward a semiotic theory of affect (by Oller, Jr., John W.) 6. Emotions as cause and the cause of...

I am the reviewer of this publication, not the author.

Destined to become a landmark work, this book is devoted principally to a reassessment of the content, categories, boundaries, and basic assumptions of pidgin and creole studies. It includes revised and elaborated papers from meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in addition to commissioned papers from leading scholars in the fi...

Typically not the focus of linguistic analysis, the expressive function nonetheless represents a core linguistic behavior. Throughout Africa, ideo-phones robustly manifest that function. When adult speakers learn and begin to use a second language, particularly in contact situations with limited L2 input, they often draw on structures and resources...

The findings of language typologists can contribute to understanding synchronic variation where no diachronic facts are available. By establishing what happens universally, one can extrapolate as to the past and perhaps as to the future of a language on the basis of synchronic evidence. One approach within such a framework concentrates on a typolog...

This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), “Bullom So” in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc.) spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language. The Mani are concentrated in a restricte...