The paper interprets Whorf's notion by turning to his original writings. Specifically, the paper makes a detailed analysis of Whorf's notion from anthropological linguistics, which largely deals with his famous distinction between overt category and covert category and his detailed description of the American Indian language Hopi; contrastive…

Analysis of data from Kekchi, a head-marking language following Mayan patterns, can provide insight into case relations and pronominal reference in head-marking languages. Tensed verb constructions are examined, focusing attention on how the verb stem can determine both the number of referents and their semantic roles. The language's predication…

Examines the phenomenon of semantic change with regard to color categories in closely related Mayan languages (Tzetal and Tzotzil) associated with radically different social milieux. It is argued that, although a model of individual cognition explains how color categories change at the basic level, a social model accounts for differences between…

The primary goal of the present study is an exposition of the structure of Mam, a Mayan language of the Mamean group. Mam is the most widely spoken of the four Mamean languages, and has been roughly estimated to have a quarter million speakers located in the departments of Huehuetenango and San Marcos in Guatemala and in the state of Chiapas in…

Six papers resulting from the fieldwork projects of members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics program at the University of North Dakota include: "A Relational Grammar Approach to Kera Syntax" (Janet K. Camburn), a syntactic study of an Afroasiatic language; "Clitic Doubling and M-Chains in Piraha" (Dan Everett), examining…

Seven original research papers by faculty and students of the Linguistics Department and other related departments of the University of Kansas are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "Particles in Tojolabal Mayan Discourse" (Jill Brody); "One Hundred Years of Lakota Linguistics (1887-1987)" (Willem J. de Reuse);…

Papers in these volumes were presented at a Mexican conference on linguistics. Most papers are in Spanish; the English translations of the titles include the following: "Directions in Contemporary Semantics" (L. Lara); "Regular Accentuation in Spanish" (C. Braithwaite); "Syntactic Order in Sonoran" (D. Brown); "Speech Datives or Interest/Not of…

This book brings together the contributions of individual language scholars, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and neurophysicians. Each chapter focuses on the human cognitive processes involved in language activity and the impact of language diversity on them. The basic issue is how to correlate language diversity with the universality…

Selected papers include: "From Core to Periphery: A Study on the Directionality of Syntactic Change in Japanese" (Kaoru Horie); "On the Extension of Body-Part Nouns to Object-Part Nouns and Spatial Adpositions" (Yo Matsumoto); "Noun Classes: Language Change and Learning" (Maria Polinsky, Dan Jackson);…