Books published by Sil International, Global Publishing

Brazil''s constitution guarantees the indigenous population the right to education in their mother tongue and according to their knowledge transmission patterns. Few studies exist on truly indigenous methods of knowledge transmission among Brazil''s ethnic minorities. This study provides an in-depth description of Kayapo knowledge transmission. It bridges the disciplines of education and anthropology and expands our knowledge of indigenous processes of education. The Kayapo, whose language is a member of the Ge family, are one of the major Amerindian societies remaining in the Brazilian Amazon region. They have a strong sense of identity, tradition, culture, and ethnic pride. The major purpose of this book is to show how they conceptualize and transmit their knowledge. Their education is learner-initiated, designed to transform a nonsocial being into a socialized Kayapo "beautiful" person. The Kayapo knowledge paradigm is shown to be global, context-dependent, integrative, and holistic. Isabel Murphy worked for more than twenty years in Brazil in the field of literacy among indigenous peoples. She based this case study on her eleven months of fieldwork in a Kayapo village, augmented by her extensive experience in literacy. She received her Ph.D. in 1992 in Educational Anthropology.

Scholars have recently begun to document the many outstanding literary (artistic, structural, and rhetorical) properties of the biblical text, qualities contributing, to a significant dimension of "meaning" that few translations, past or present, attempt to reproduce even on a limited basis. Closely related to this is the correspondingly manifold communicative potential of different target languages all over the world, a rich inventory of resources that are only rarely exploited to the full in a translation. Accordingly, this book proposes the implementation of a literary functional-equivalence (LiFE) method of translation that seeks to represent or recreate in a given language the variety of expressive and affective dynamics - the great impact and appeal, including the beauty - of the diverse tests of Scripture. Many examples pertaining to the biblical language as well as several Bantu languages are included to illustrate this methodology and show how competent mother-tongue translators can be trained to apply it practically in their work. Dr. Wendland teaches at the Lutheran Bible Institute and Seminary in Lusaka, Zambia, and is a United Bible Societies Translation Consultant. He is the author of numerous studies on the Bantu languages of South Central Africa, biblical exegesis, and translation theory.

This investigation analyzes pragmatic ways in which Spanish is used to achieve persuasion in television advertising. The author applies pragmatic models to commercials for products and services from three countries--Chile, Spain, and the United States. She addresses the questions: (1) Which pragmatic devices occur most frequently? (2) How are these devices linguistically coded? (3) Are any differences evident between regional varieties of Spanish? and (4) How are pragmalinguistic features of television advertising used to effect persuasion? The most representative variables include speech acts, indexicals, politeness, implicatures, violations of Grice's Maxims, and speaker considerations. The study contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of pragmatics and of persuasion in Spanish by (1) offering a procedure that may be replicated; (2) addressing multiple pragmatic categories; and (3) examining the relationship between pragmatic strategies and persuasion among Spanish speakers. Given the vital role of the media in society, Spanish television advertising reflects the pragmatic communication of persuasion by and to Spanish speakers. Pragmática de discurso persuasivo de publicidad de television en español. Esta investigación analiza las maneras pragmáticas en las cuales se usa el español para persuadir en la publicidad de televisión y contribuye al entendimiento lingüístico de pragmática y persuasión en español. El libro está escrito en inglés.

Kenneth Pike''s influence spread far and wide during the last half of the twentieth century. The contributors to this volume are just a few of the thousands of scholars whose work was influenced by Pike''s teaching and writing. These essays will help younger scholars grasp something of his intellectual influence through his contribution to linguistics, anthropology, and many other disciplines. Long before the concept of "endangered languages" came into vogue in the 1990s, Pike was instilling in his students the importance of recording, preserving, and working to keep alive the thousands of unwritten languages spoken throughout the world. Pike''s work with SIL International took him to many parts of the world as a consultant and lecturer. He worked with speakers of hundreds of indigenous languages as well as with SIL field linguists studying those languages. At the same time, he interacted with scholars at international conferences and lectured at universities in many countries. Essays in this volume include papers by authors from at least ten countries and six disciplines. Readers of this volume will find a rich introduction to the life and philosophy of Dr. Pike. They will see how he considered all aspects of life - language, culture, worldview, religion, and ways of thinking and learning - to be a coherent whole. They will also find the authors'' own comments as to how Pike influenced and contributed to their lives and work.

This book takes a hard look at the traumatic cultural changes that our planet's remaining hunter-gatherer societies experienced in the twentieth century, and the precarious future that is about to engulf them in the twenty-first century. The nine authors in this volume all agree that the foraging way of life, humankind's most successful adaptation for many thousands of years, has come to a close with the end of the second millennium. Case studies are presented here looking at the past and the uncertain future for post-foraging societies, and specifically the central African Pygmies, the San Bushmen, and the Agta Negritos. Interwoven with these chapters are emphases on tropical deforestation and indigenous human rights, looking at these through the framework of human ecology. As Alan Barnard, U Edinburgh, states, "If the human rights of proud former foraging peoples are given the attention they deserve, then there can be a bright future for them in Millennium Three. The task is not an easy one, but this book will help greatly to focus our attention on the issues that matter."

The books in this series are analytical commentaries on the Greek text of New Testament books. Each book first identifies the high-level semantic components of the text and indicates the relationships between them. These components are then further analyzed to identify sub-components and their relationships. This process is continued until the basic units of communication, called propositions, are identified. These propositions are stated in semantically unskewed English glosses. Theme statements for paragraphs and larger units are derived from the analysis. A discussion of the evidence supporting the analysis is also given.

Language spread, or expansion into new geographic and language-use areas, has been studied largely through observation. Thus, discussions of the dynamics of language spread have been based primarily on data obtained through observation. Mark Karan employs a memory span test to evaluate the competence of a large number of subjects in a spreading language, Sango of the Central African Republic. The data from this test are the basis of the author''s statistical studies of the social determinants and predictors of competence in the spreading language. The results indicate the overriding importance of individual motivations for understanding the dynamics of the process of language spread. Based on his findings, Karan presents a framework for discussion, research, and intervention in language spread, along with guidelines for more successful intervention in shift situations. Numerous researchers have linked language spread and language change--language internal modification over time. This quantitative study provides substantive comparison of the two phenomena with data on the distribution of social factors such as age, sex, and education. These distributions are very similar to the distributions of social factors in language change, indicating that language spread and language change are similar processes. Mark Karan earned a Ph.D. degree at University of Pennsylvania in Linguistics in 1996. He did fieldwork in Togo, Benin and Central African Republic. He has served Associate Director of Togo-Benin SIL (1984-1987), Associate Director Central African Republic Academics/Language Programs (1990-2001), and as professor and director of University of North Dakota SIL (1998-2003). Dr Karan is currently the Training Division Director, Academic Affairs, SIL International 2002- .

The author presents a comprehensive look at language use and attitudes among the Kiche people of Guatemala. The book combines qualitative and quantitive analyses to test two hypotheses: (1) that K''iche'' and Spanish are in a stable diglossic relationship and (2) that there is a significant relationship between language use and degree of acceptance of modern (i.e., nontraditional) identity factors in K''iche'' communities. The study examines seven K''iche'' communities, using the field notes and observational data collected over a two-year period. The analysis of the qualitative data follows the framework of Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory. The quantitive analysis is based on Fishman''s notion of domains of use (who speaks what to whom and when). This book will appeal to sociolinguists interested in factors affecting language maintenance and shift, Mayanists who are involved in current efforts to revitalize and maintain the languages of Guatemala, and language planners and policy makers who desire to trace the outworkings of language policy decisions in an actual language-use context. M. Paul Lewis earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University, Washington D.C. He began fieldwork in Guatemala in 1975 and has worked among the K''iche'', Uspanteko, and Ixil peoples in Guatemala. He was the International Sociolinguistics Coordinator, 1996-2002 and is currently an International Sociolinguistics Consultant.

Modern economic and technological changes are accelerating the rate of social change in indigenous cultures around the world. The Ashéninka of the Amazon jungle region of east-central Peru confront change from two perspectives: the individual and the sociohistorical. All Ashéninka recall through their stories the four centuries of change since their earliest contacts with Spanish speakers. For the Ashéninka, all learning is situated in a complex blend of factors: history, beliefs, motives, practices, and persons. Children learn some skills in a guided manner, similar to apprenticeship, in which an adult consciously aids the child. They learn other skills in a nonguided manner; the child organizes the learning activities, which take the form of dramatic play, solitary experimentation, and collaborative learning with peers. As with learning traditional Ashéninka culture, the learning of a new culture is situated in its own complex blend of factors. Increasing contact with Spanish-speakers and increasing dependence on the market economy prompt the Ashéninka to give more value to learning Spanish, to organizing into villages, and to giving their children a school education. Anderson's methodology in studying social change and its effects on education are applicable in many other parts of the world.

The reader of Quiegolani Zapotec Syntax will find a careful syntactic analysis of this language, presented descriptively and with a theoretical analysis. In the three sections of the book, Cheryl Black provides a coherent, explanatory analysis for many facets of the syntax of this VSO language. Part I describes the morphology and syntax, as well as anaphoric relations. Parts II and III provide a theoretical analysis of the various syntactic constructions, utilizing a Principles and Parameters approach. Part II examines clause structure, including focus and topic constructions, interrogatives, negative constructions, and their interactions. Part III extends the analysis to phrase structures such as verbal and nominal phrases. The final chapter demonstrates that the special quantifier constructions that mark number in the language exhibit the same basic principles and structures as the rest of the grammar, showing that a small number of principles or constraints can determine the full grammar of a language. Quiegolani Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. This language family has received relatively little attention by syntacticians, making Dr. Black''s work especially valuable. Theoretical linguists, as well as those mainly interested in description and typology, will find it of interest.

The Peruvian Ministry of Education initiated bilingual schools in Amazonia soon after the Machiguenga people-inhabitants of the Peruvian rainforest-received a written alphabet in the late 1940s. Despite barriers of distance, language and cultural diversity, this educational program is an ongoing success. The 1993 data shows an average literacy rate of nearly 65 percent, with high literacy use-predictive of literacy continuance. This first-hand account, by the educator who helped develop the Machiguenga schools, is rich with descriptions, providing teachers and literacy practitioners an in-depth study of a minority-language educational program. Students of cross-cultural training will find a culturally sensitive model for teaching and evaluation. This study is significant since it relates the favorable attitudes toward literacy among an isolated people group, formerly in a monolingual area with no government schools until 1954. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Machiguenga teachers have conducted all primary level education even though they were at first barely literate themselves. These maturing teachers continued their education during summer sessions and shared their knowledge with their pupils year by year as they themselves advanced through the grades. Currently the three area high schools are staffed both by Spanish-speaking teachers and Machiguenga personnel with tertiary education. This book reflects the delight the Machiguenga people find in learning. They have voluntarily expended enormous effort to make reading a part of their society. This is both a scholarly work and a present day drama.

Dr. Showalter examines language attitudes and bilingualism in four rural speech communities in Burkina Faso, West Africa. His study provides a detailed look into ways in which these communities respond to the everyday linguistic diversity of their milieu. Maps and diagrams add clarity in explaining the linguistic situation. For his research, he adapted the matched-guise testing method in order to explore attitudes toward the language variation that permeates rural West African life. His results demonstrate the viability of indirect testing methods in this environment. They reveal, on the one hand, numerical measures of linguistic variability and bilingual achievement, and on the other hand, community attitudes toward shared ethnic identity, social contact, linguistic awareness, personal character, and social status. He fleshed out the survey data with ethnographic insights gained during the two years he spent in rural Burkina Faso carrying out his research. Linguists and anthropologists interested in the interplay of language and society, as well as Africanists seeking a better understanding of the sometimes astounding linguistic diversity of the region, will find this book especially valuable.

A collection of selected papers presented at SIL International''s Third International Language Assessment Conference in England (1997). Presents papers by leading scholars and SIL International language survey specialists that reflect various issues related to ethnolinguistic vitality and its assessment and present a variety of approaches to this study. Includes the sociology of language, anthropological grid/group model, social network theory, and motivations for ethnolinguistic vitality maintenance, power, and solidarity orientations. Is of interest to sociolinguists, sociologists, anthropological linguists, and those in language planning and language development. Is a source of information about a wide range of language situations, and an encouragement to those working among speakers of less commonly known languages.

Compares and contrasts Embera-Katio and Northern Embera (Colombia) proper with each other and with other languages of the Embera branch of the Choco family. Gives special reference to Epena Pedee (Saija) of the Southern Embera group. Is of special interest to linguists of all persuasions, especially typologists, Americanists, and those interested in the Choco and adjacent language families. Builds on the fourth book in the subseries, Epena Pedee syntax, by Phillip L. Harms. Details grammatical structures from phonemics to discourse.

Each volume in the Exegetical Summaries series works through the original text phrase by phrase. English equivalents are provided for all Hebrew and Greek words, making this an excellent reference for exegetes of all levels. Questions that occur to exegetes as they study the text are stated and then answered by summarizing the ways many scholars have interpreted the text. This information should help translators or students in making their own exegetical decisions. As a basis for discussion, a semi-literal translation of the text is given. The first question to be answered is the meaning of key words in context. Information from standard lexicons is given and then translations of the word are cited from a dozen major Bible versions and from commentaries that offer their own translations of the text. Questions about the grammar and discourse structure of the original languages are answered by summarizing the views of many commentators. When exegetical disagreements appear in the commentaries and versions, the various interpretations are listed. This book is not intended to replace the commentaries that are consulted. Rather than being a stand-alone commentary, this book summarizes many important details of exegesis that should be considered in studying the biblical text.

The study of language can be compared to an explorer mapping out new territory or a miner working a deep vein of gold. Marion Miller spent over thirty years digging up and revealing nuggets in the phonology and grammar of the Desano language. She presents here a written record of the results of her years of living with the Desano people and studying and speaking the Desano language. Written in a descriptive style and using a form and function approach, this study presents a comprehensive overview of the parts of Desano grammar, from the phonetic to the discourse features. Although the classification system of the Tucanoan languages has also been written up in the Tuyuca and Barasana, it is repeated in this grammar for comparative purposes to show how the different groups make these classifications. Verb compounding is covered in greater depth here than was explored in other treatises. The Desano people live in the southeastern part of Colombia and across the border in Brazil. There are twenty-two Desano dialects; examples in this grammar study are from the boreka porã dialect.

The books in this series are analytical commentaries on the Greek text of New Testament books. Each book first identifies the high-level semantic components of the text and indicates the relationships between them. These components are then further analyzed to identify sub-components and their relationships. This process is continued until the basic units of communication, called propositions, are identified. These propositions are stated in semantically unskewed English glosses. Theme statements for paragraphs and larger units are derived from the analysis. A discussion of the evidence supporting the analysis is also given.

This book is designed as a textbook and is intended to present a sample of the more popular approaches to linguistic theorizing. It covers different aspects of each theory including general ontology, methodology, world view, and certain specifics including its problem-solving capacity regarding the English auxiliary complex. It gives a brief summary of the salient points of each theory and concludes with a brief treatment of concurrent developments in phonology. Included are discussions on: tagmemics, generative transformational grammar, stratificational linguistics, Montague grammar, generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar and functional approaches to grammar.

The study of evidentiality is in its relative infancy, and each new study in this largely unexplored area of linguistic structure reveals subtleties of grammatical and semantic behavior that give reason to reconsider and deepen analyses found in previous works. Evidentiality is usually discussed in terms of the kinds of justification a speaker has for making a particular assertion. When the author first began studying the Wanka Quechua language, he was immediately struck with the fact that the evidential system was not behaving as he had expected. Careful consideration of the individual markers revealed semantic nuances that are not usually found in other treatments on this topic. This volume provides a detailed look at the semantics of the evidential system of one Quechua language with implications for others. Parallels are noted with evidential systems of unrelated languages. The author analyzes the Wanka Quechua evidential system using a cognitive view of grammar and applies this approach to issues of semantics and category structure.

The temporal categories of tense and aspect have received much attention in linguistic literature. But often scholars concentrate on their grammatical description without regard to their function in discourse. This work is a comprehensive and systematic description of the function of tense and aspect in the Obolo language. The data for this study are ten texts, both written and oral, from the Ngo dialect of Obolo, which is spoken in southeastern coastal Nigeria. They represent the four main discourse genres of narrative, procedural, expository, and hortatory. In the model adopted for this work, the discussion of tense and aspect in the sentence correlates with the referential component, while the discussion of the discourse functions of tense and aspect correlates with the textual component.

Written in English and Spanish, this collection of tales presents a small sampling of the oral literature of the Zapotec people who live in the municipality of San Lorenzo Texmelucan, located southwest of Oaxaca City in the district of Sola de Vega, Mexico. In order to make the tales accessible to the Zapotec people, the original Zapotec is included using the practical orthography of the area. Thirteen folktales are presented, including one with a unique style in which a Zapotec poet communicates his worldview. In addition, one chapter is a collection of forty-six proverbs portraying Zapotec wisdom in short traditional expressions about life, vices, virtues, and human relationships. A cultural sketch highlights some of the patterns that characterize the people of San Lorenzo as a cultural unit.

The purpose of this study is to provide a generative and autosegmental phonological analysis of the Zaiwa language with emphasis on prosodic components. This is a preliminary phonology of Zaiwa with a relatively complete treatment of all phonological aspects, concentrating on suprasegmental components. The generative/autosegmental framework employed incorporates feature geometry in a manner that provides a view of the interaction of segmentals and suprasegmentals. In particular, the interaction of voice quality, tone, and consonantal features are presented using feature geometry and underspecification in order to differentiate lexical tone from derived tone. It is the author''s goal to provide a basis for understanding the processes occurring in Zaiwa phonology and provide helpful insights in understanding similar processes in other Tibeto-Burman languages.

David Foris gathered the data for this volume during the sixteen years he lived in the northwest part of Oaxaca in Mexico. He settled in the Chinantla, a Mexican term meaning ''an enclosed place'', a region boxed in by high mountain ridges and difficult to reach. Foris makes available the knowledge he has acquired about the fascinating Sochiapan Chinantec language. It is an isolated language that exhibits a complex system of verbal inflection. Speakers of the language can use more than thirty tone-stress distinctions to communicate messages in whistle speech with minimal ambiguity. The majority of words consist of a single syllable; there are a small number of two-syllable words and less than a dozen known tri-syllabics. This model-neutral presentation describes everything from the phonemes up through phrases and clauses to compound sentences; from the changes of tone and stress to changes in nucleus to signal a wide variety of tense, aspect, and related features. Regarding this book, Dr. Rudolph C. Troike, Head of the Department of English at the University of Arizona, says, "This is overall a masterful piece of work which makes a major contribution to Chinantec studies and to language typological research in general."

The Dong people are renowned within China for their beautiful singing and their architectural prowess. Their gifts have grown and flourished in the valleys and mountains of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi Provinces of Southwestern China. In relative obscurity before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the 2.5 million Dong people are fast gaining an international reputation. The Dong language is distinctive for its many tones. It is often referred to outside China as Kam and occupies a significant position in the Kam-Tai family of the Sino-Tibetan phylum. Long Yaohong and Zheng Guoqiao are recognized authorities on Dong language research. Mr. Long is a native speaker of Dong. He provides an introduction, touching on many aspects of Dong history, culture, and language, and a discussion of the grammar. Mr. Zheng supplies sections on phonology, lexicon, and orthography. The two authors jointly present a chapter on Dong dialects. The book as a whole represents the first comprehensive description of the Dong language available in English.

Lila Wistrand-Robinson, who is an Adjunct Professor of Social Studies at Black River Technical College in Pocohontas, Arkansas, has taken the data from her doctoral thesis on Cashibo, a Panoan language, and revised it for general readership. The research for this work was done over a six-year period during which Dr. Wistrand-Robinson made several trips to the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Azul ''Blue Ridge'' area of the Andes in Peru. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains many of the myths, legends, and chants passed from father to son among the Cashibo. For those readers who are particularly interested in how the stories relate to other Panoan languages, each tale has been linked with Thompson''s list of anthropological themes. Part two of the book describes the history of the Cashibo people and culture up to the mid 1960s. The references section includes not only those cited by the author in the volume, but also anthropological and linguistic works that discuss Panoan culture in general, and the Cashibo in particular. This section alone is a valuable resource for those interested in studying the languages and cultures of the indigenous groups living in the Peruvian rain forest.

Case Grammar has been around for a long time. Other theories have come and gone. Why a book on Case Grammar now? Dr. Walter Cook, S.J., is one of the promoters of the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics and author of numerous publications in linguistics. In "Case Grammar Theory" (1989), the author described the Case Grammar models of Fillmore, Chafe, Anderson, Gruber, Jackendoff, and some tagmemicists as contrasting models within Case Grammar theory. In the present volume, intended as a companion volume to the previous one, we find a methodology for Case Grammar, tested in extended textual analysis including Ernest Hemingway''s "The Old Man and the Sea." Because Case Grammar lends itself well to displaying the way syntactic features are associated with semantic structures, the author is able to use Case Grammar as an unusually clear, simple guide for sentence analysis.

When a workshop on logical connectives was first suggested, a leading linguist asked, "Are they really logical?" Logical relations between propositions were an elusive subject about which little research was available prior to that workshop held in 1989. Field method guides offered nothing for the analysis of signals that tell how a speaker intends for the listener to interpret and associate the propositions in a discourse. The articles in this volume discuss the indicators used by speakers and hearers in a wide range of languages to connect parts of discourse. The cues are sometimes related explicitly to lexical or syntactic features of the discourse; they are often linked to pragmatic aspects, the intended illocutionary effect, and at other times to the knowledge of the participants in the discourse. The goal of the authors is to assist the reader in reaching an understanding of how to determine what the speaker intends, how to identify the cues for the listener, and how to employ those cues.

The Cubeo people live principally along the Vaupés, Cuduyarí, and Querarí Rivers in the northwestern Amazon River Basin. Although the Cubeos have had contact with people outside their communities since the sixteenth century, their language and culture have remained largely intact. In this fifth volume in the series of Colombia language studies, the reader gains an overview of Cubeo phonology and morphophonemics, word classes, clause structure, and subordination. The text is richly supplemented with examples. The various affixes presented in the text are listed in the first appendix with their glosses and a reference to the sections in which the affixes are discussed. In the second appendix, the practical orthography is summarized. This grammar is especially interesting for linguists studying languages of the Tuconoan language family. The distinctive features of Cubeo grammar are the extensive system of classifiers for nouns and their modifiers, the evidential system for verbs indicating the source or validity of the information communicated, and a basic division of all verbs into two categories-stative and dynamic.

While many books have been written about basic literacy, few offer detailed information on how to plan and carry out a community literacy project. Fewer still give guidance in tackling the additional barriers of language, culture, and logistics in developing countries and in treating the local community as an active partner rather than a passive recipient in the literacy process. In Local Literacies: Theory and Practice, Glenys Waters includes these elements and presents a practical guide for developing a literacy program. Beginning with a discussion of the theories of learning and reading, the author provides a detailed description of how to plan and organize a literacy program when the practitioner has little to go on but wit, knowledge, and determination. With approximately one half of the book given to the development of instructional methods and materials in reading, writing, and basic math, Local Literacies will be especially helpul to those doing literacy work in linguistically diverse settings in much of the developing world. The reader will quickly discover that this is a book written by a person who has "been there and done that." Waters has spent more than twenty years in Australia and Papua New Guinea, both as a practitioner and a consultant in programs of literacy for adults and children. This personal experience, plus a thorough knowledge of the professional literature, make Local Literacies a "must" for the pioneering literacy worker.