Compounds have often been noted to straddle the boundary between “words” and “phrases,” having some amount of internal structure (Scalise and Vogel 2010).On the one hand, compounds have the characteristics of “words.” As a start-ing point, we can define a compound as a word which consists of two or more words (Fabb 1998). Compounds often have a meaning which builds on one, but not t…
How can there be so many different languages in the world while the abilityto use language seems to be fundamentally the same for every human being?This is without doubt one of the core questions of linguistics, and it is thisBig Question that is hidden behind the smaller questions in this book. Tostudy the variation and the underlying linguistic system in a scientific way,we ideally want to ha…
The primary sources for this work are the fragments of Akajeru (words, phrases and some short sentences) contained (passim) in the pages of Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown’s monograph The Andaman Islanders (1922), which gathers the results of his anthropological research carried out on the Andamans between 1906 and 1908. Although the languages of the archipelago wer…