Rövid leírás:

The volume goes a good way towards remedying the lack of available grammatical descriptions for Tai-Kadai. With consultations and input from a range of contributors, the book is a compact 40,000-word overview of Thai. The work includes relevant cross-referencing to sections of the volume treating other languages in the family, as well as sign-posting to sources in the bibliography.

Hosszú leírás:

The Routledge Language Family Series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, or those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development.

With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area.

It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time.

Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists.

ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University.

JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.

Diller?s two chapters, ?Introduction? (Ch. 1) and ?Resources for Thai Language Research? (Ch. 3), are a pleasure. The section on terminology in Ch 1. Is as good a presentation of this vexed topic as I have seen anywhere. Ch. 3 elegantly combines (i) guiding the reader through a hefty number of published works (there is a twenty-eight page list of references) on all aspects of Siamese linguistics with (ii) with setting forth a quite complete basic sketch of Siamese phonology, syntax, phonology, semantics, diachrony and more. - Reviewed in November 2010

Tartalomjegyzék:

Part 1: Overview Chapters   Part 2: Tai Languages: Overviews and Resources  Part 3: Tai Languages: Special Topics   Part 4:  Grammaticalization and Historical Syntax  Part 5:  Kam-Sui Languages  Part 6: Hlai (Li) and Kra (Kadai) Languages.