LINGUIST List 11.2191

Wed Oct 11 2000

Books: Text Ling/Socioling, Language Acquisition

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Gillian Caglayan, Text Ling/Socioling: Textualization of Oral Epics, L. Honko (Ed.)
2. Gillian Caglayan, The Acquisition of Lexical & Grammatical Aspect, P. Li & Y. Shirai

New Publication from Mouton de Gruyter

>From the series
Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs
Series Editor: Werner Winter


Textualization of Oral Epics
Edited by Lauri Honko

2000. 23 x 15,5 cm. viii, 387 pages.
Cloth. DM 258,- /EUR 131,91 /�S 1815,- /sFr 205,-/approx. US$ 129.00
ISBN 3-11-016928-2
(Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 128)

The task of textualizing oral epics in writing is a mission impossible.
Oral performance cannot be captured in letters and words. Too many
essential features are simply left aside in the written codification of
a speech event which normally employs a wide array of paralinguistic
means of expression from gesture to music. Yet the documentation of the
rarely, if ever, heard full oral epic text lends the oral work a
narrative value not found in its culturally prescribed but heavily
shortened performances. The present volume reflects the awakening among
top epic scholars, a new understanding of the demands for accuracy and
open reporting on methods in field documentation. The days are past when
a scholar sought a "master form" by combining elements from different
singers of epics, sometimes from different regions and eras, too.

Such composite texts were slipping beyond the local poetic system. Their
connection to sung performance was lost or skewed. The reaction of
modern scholarship has been to keep as close to the oral rendition of an
epic text as possible and to listen carefully to the poet's voice. The
task is to elicit from the mind of the singer the form he finds most
adequate to represent the epic. The present volume examines the
textualization process of long oral epics, their oral composition,
documentation, codification in writing, editing and publication. It
deals with the ethnography of the oral narrative art still alive mainly
outside Europe and enhances our understanding of long-dead epic
traditions such as Homer, Beowulf, Nibelungenlied and the Eddas.

Contents:

Preface
Introduction
LAURI HONKO
Text as process and practice: the textualization of oral epics

European epics
MINNA SKAFTE JENSEN
The writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey

JOHN MILES FOLEY
The textualization of South Slavic oral epic and its implications for
oral-derived epic

JOSEPH HARRIS
Performance, textualization, and textuality of "elegy" in Old Norse


Turkic and Siberian epics
KARL REICHL
Silencing the voice of the singer: problems and strategies in the
editing of Turkic oral epics

ARTHUR T. HATTO
Textology and epic texts from Siberia and beyond

JUHA PENTIKAINEN
"I lift you up, the dry throats" - on Nanaj shamic epic


Indian epics
JOHN BROCKINGTON
The textualization of the Sanskrit epics

LAURI HONKO
Text and context in the textualization of Tulu oral epics


African epics
JOHN WILLIAM JOHNSON
Authenticity and oral performance: textualizing the epics of Africa for
Western audiences

JAN KNAPPERT
The textualization of Swahili epics

DWIGHT F. REYNOLDS
Creating an epic: from apprenticeship to publication

DAN BEN-AMOS
The narrator as an editor


North-American and Oceanian epics
DELL HYMES
Sung epic and Native American ethopoetics

ANNA-LEENA SIIKALA
Generic models, entextualization and creativity: epic tradition on the
Southern Cook Islands


Index
List of contributors



For more information please contact the publisher:
Mouton de Gruyter
Genthiner Str. 13
10785 Berlin, Germany
Fax: +49 30 26005 222
e-mail: ordersdegruyter.de

Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter
http://www.degruyter.com

New Publication from Mouton de Gruyter

>From the series
Studies on Language Acquisition
Series Editor: Peter Jordens

Ping Li and Yasuhiro Shirai
The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

2000. 23 x 15,5 cm. ix, 261 pages.
Cloth. DM 178,- /EUR 91,01 /�S 1299,- /sFr 158,- /approx. US$ 89.00
ISBN 3-11-016615-1
(STUDIES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 16)

This book provides a state-of-the-art review of the acquisition of
lexical and grammatical aspect, in both first and second language
acquisition. More specifically, it presents a comprehensive analysis of
how child and adult speakers learn to mark aspect, an important
subsystem of language that marks the temporal contour of events by means
of inherent lexical meanings and/or grammatical morphology (in contrast
to tense which marks the temporal location of events with respect to
past, present, and future). The studies presented are based on the
authors' research on English, Chinese, and Japanese, and they address
the issue of the acquisition of aspect from a number of different
perspectives, among them crosslinguistic, developmental, and
computational. Detailed empirical results are integrated with
theoretical analyses and syntheses, along dimensions such as innateness
versus input, prototypes versus cryptotypes, rules versus connections.

Linguistically, the authors' approach to aspectual phenomena relies on
the interaction between lexical aspect (e.g. state, activity,
accomplishment, and achievement) and grammatical aspect (e.g.
perfective, imperfective, and progressive). Developmentally, their
approach to acquisition phenomena relies on connectionist distributional
learning that gives rise to categories of protototypes and cryptotypes.

Readers from linguistics, psychology, language acquisition, language
education, and cognitive science should all find this book a relevant
and important text for their research and teaching.

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Aspect: Problem of lexicon and morphology
 Theories of language acquisition and the acquisition of aspect
Acquisition of aspect in English
Acquisition of aspect in Chinese
Acquisition of aspect in Japanese
A connectionist model of the acquisition of aspect
Acquisition of aspect: Conclusions and future directions

Postscript
Notes
References
Author Index
Subject Index

About the authors:
Professor Ping Li is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University
of Richmond, United States.
Professor Yasuhiro Shirai is Associate Professor, Department of Modern
Languages, at Cornell University, Ithaca, United States.

For more information please contact the publisher:
Mouton de Gruyter
Genthiner Str. 13
10785 Berlin, Germany
Fax: +49 30 26005 222
e-mail: ordersdegruyter.de

Please visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter
http://www.degruyter.com