The Languages of East and Southeast Asia An Introduction

This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It combines serious but accessible treatments of diverse areas not usually found in a single volume: for example, word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, communicative style. Written with great clarity and an eye for interesting examples, the book is a textbook for students of linguistics, Asian languages, and Asian studies.

Cliff Goddard is Professor in Linguistics at the University of New England, NSW, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research interests are in the areas of language description, lexical and grammatical semantics, and the intersection between language, meaning, and culture. His books include Semantic Analysis (1998), and Meaning and Universal Grammar (co-edited with Anna Wierzbicka, 2002). His numerous scholarly articles include descriptive studies of lexical, grammatical and discourse aspects of Malay, English, and Yankunytjatjara. He is the editor of two forthcoming edited collections of work on Ethnopragmatics and Crosslinguistic Semantics.