Commands A Cross-Linguistic Typology

This book focuses on the form and the function of commands--directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders--from a typological perspective. A team of internationally-renowned experts in the field examine the interrelationship of these speech acts with cultural stereotypes and practices, as well as their origins and development, especially in the light of language contact. The volume begins with an introduction outlining the marking and the meaning of imperatives and other ways of expressing commands and directives. Each of the chapters that follow offers an in-depth analysis of commands in a particular language. These analyses are cast in terms of 'basic linguistic theory'--a cumulative typological functional framework--and the chapters are arranged and structured in a way that allows useful comparison between them. The languages investigated include Quechua, Japanese, Lao, Aguaruna and Ashaninka Satipo (both from Peru), Dyirbal (from Australia), Zenzontepec Chatino (from Mexico), Nungon, Tayatuk, and Karawari (from Papua New Guinea), Korowai (from West Papua), Wolaitta (from Ethiopia), and Northern Paiute (a native language of the United States).

1 - Imperatives and commands: A cross-linguistic view
2 - Imperatives and commands in Quechua
3 - The grammatical representation of commands and prohibitions in Aguaruna
4 - Imperatives in Ashaninka Satipo (Kampa Arawak) of Peru
5 - Commands in Zenzontepec Chatino (Otomanguean)
6 - What Dyirbal uses instead of commands
7 - On the heterogeneity of Northern Paiute directives
8 - Imperatives and commands in Japanese
9 - Linguistic expression of commands in Lao
10 - Imperatives and command strategies in Tayatuk (Morobe, PNG)
11 - Imperatives and commands in Nungon
12 - The imperative paradigm of Korowai, a Greater Awyu language of West Papua
13 - Commands as a form of intimacy among the Karawari of Papua New Guinea
14 - Commands in Wolaitta
15 - Veiled commands: Anthropological perspectives on directives

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003) and The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008; paperback 2010), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American and Papuan languages and typological issues including evidentials, classifiers, and serial verbs. Her other recent publications with OUP include Languages of the Amazon (2012; paperback 2015), The Art of Grammar (2014), and How Gender Shapes the World (2016). She is co-editor, with R. M. W. Dixon, of The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (CUP, 2017), and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (OUP, 2018). R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ) and a comprehensive historical/typological account Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (CUP, 2002). He is also the author of A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP, 2004; paperback 2011), and A New Approach to English Grammar (OUP, 2005). His other OUP publications include the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (2010-12), Making New Words (2014), Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (2015) and Are Some Languages Better than Others? (2016). His academic biography, I am a Linguist, was published by Brill in 2011.