Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

Although translation is a means of intercultural communication, it represents a challenge when it comes to rendering the intended meaning of some propositions, particularly because every language has its distinctive features and structures that may not be accurately rendered into the target language. This challenge is reinforced when translation…

While reviewing the controversial concept of describing language via the phoneme, the author spells out many problems caused by the discrepancies of phonemic theory and actual speech production. Phonological variation in actual speech utterances prompts the analysis of the phonology of language on two levels--the phonemic and the distinctive…