46 search hits
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Word-class-changing derivations in Rawang
(2007)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication.
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The how and why of syntactic relations
(2006)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Human communication takes place when one person does something that when seen or heard by another person is taken to be done with the intention to communicate, and the other person, having seen the communicator show his or her intention to communicate, then uses inference to determine what the communicator intends to communicate. This is possible because the addressee assumes that the communicator is a rational person, that is, acts with goals in mind (see Grice 1975), and so must be doing the act for a reason, and it is worth the addressee’s effort to try to determine what that reason is, that is, determine the relevance of the act.
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Clause linking in Dulong-Rawang
(2006)
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Randy J. LaPolla
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Direct and indirect speech in Tagalog
(2005)
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Randy J. LaPolla
Dory Poa
- Tagalog is an Austronesian language of the Philippines. It is the basis for one of the two official languages of the Philippines, Pilipino, and as such potentially spoken by 81 million people, though there are many sub-varieties.
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Comparative constructions in Rawang
(2004)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Dulong and Rawang are closely related Tibeto-Burman languages spoken just south and east of Tibet.
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Subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman : can an individual-identifying standard be developed? ; how do we factor in the history of migrations and language contact?
(2000)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Two problems cloud our understanding of subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman. One is the lack of consistent and clear standards and principles for subgrouping. Subgrouping is often based on certain features that the languages are said to share, or on a few shared lexical items, or even on the fieldworker's intuitions, or on how remote speakers feel different languages are (the degree of mutual intelligibility).
