Robbins Burling
Biographic Data
| ID | 104113 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robbins Burling |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robbins |
| FAMILY NAME | Burling |
| SIGNATURE | BURLING R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 787 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1958 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
North East Indian Linguistics
North East Indian Linguistics Volume 2 is the second in a series of selected papers presented at the International Conferences of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), a forum for the study of the languages of North East India. The North East Indian languages are the richest and most diverse, yet also one of the least-well-known regions of the linguistics world.The book essentially discusses tonology and phonology in the Assam floodp…
Language, Ethnicity and Migration in North-Eastern India
The peoples of north-eastern India often construct migration stories in an attempt to explain their history and present distribution. These stories assume that language and ethnic (tribal) boundaries coincide, and that they endure through long periods. Ethnic boundaries, however, are widely contested in north-eastern India, and even language boundaries are interpreted in varied ways so as to support particular ethnic and political goals. While pe…
The Talking Ape
In this fascinating, smind-opening book, Robbins Burling presents the most convincing account of the origins of language ever published. He sheds new light on how language affects the way we think, behave, and relate to each other; and he gives us a deeper understanding of the nature of language itself. The author traces language back to its earliest origins among our distant ape-like forbears several million years ago and charts its growth to th…
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous l…
Personal Names in a Mande (Garo) Village
The Mandes (Garos), a hill people of northeastern India, have had no fixed inventory of personal names. Instead of choosing a conventional name for a child, parents try to find a sequence of sounds that has rarely or never before been used to name a Mande. Given names often reveal the person's gender but they rarely have any other meaning. Kinship group names, by contrast, are shared by hundreds or even thousands of others. Thus, given names are …
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind
PART 1: ENTRY INTO LANGUAGE PART 2: THEORETICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX
On the Origin of Languages
This book presents a series of illuminating studies which conclusively demonstrates that the prevailing conception of historical linguistics is deeply flawed. Most linguists today believe that there is no good evidence that the Indo-European family of languages is related to any other language family, or even any other language. In like manner, the New World is deemed to contain hundreds of language families, among which there are no apparent lin…
Language, Culture, and Society
Human Universals
Lunatic Lovers of Language
Patterns of Language
The Uses of Language. Words: Meaning and the Lexicon. Morphology. Lexical Variation and Change. Appendix: Language Families of the World. Sounds: Phonetics. Phonology. Phonological Variation. Variation Through Time: Phonological Change. Sentences: Generative Grammer. The Functions of Syntax. Syntactic Typology. Syntactic Variation. Syntactic Change. Growth. Pidgin and Creole Languages. First and Second Language Learning. Language and the Human Sp…
Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication [and Comments and Reply]
Glottogenesis and Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens
On the Evolution of Language
The Crucial Mutation for Language
Language and Species. Derek Bickerton Chicago: University of Chicago Press1990297 pp. $24.95 (cloth
Linguistic Anthropology
Learning a Field Language
Understanding a Mandi Story
Black Street Speech
Preface 1. Introduction: Street Speech as a Social Dialect 2. The Birth of Black Street Speech 3. Street Speech and Formal Speech: Linguistic Survival in Black and White Societies 4. The Scholar and the Street: Collecting the Data 5. Specialized Lexical Marking and Alternation Code Switching versus Style Shifting Topic-Related Shifting Syllable Contraction and Expansion Variable Forestressing of Bisyllabic Words Hypercorrection Lexical Summary 6.…
Garo Marriage to the Wife's Daughter
A proposal for computer-assisted instruction in vocabulary
Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman
Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change
An Introductory Course in Reading French
Students who wish to read French and who are willing to omit instruction in the spoken language have learned successfully by using texts that are mixtures of French and English. The texts begin with English words in French word order, and in subsequent passages a few French words are substituted for the English words. Later the proportion of French gradually rises. The method has the advantage that adult students can practice from the beginning w…
Naga Pidgin
Language in the Inner City
This article examines ritual insults among adolescents in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, focusing on the rules and constraints that govern their use. The authors analyze the structure and function of these insults, demonstrating how they serve as a form of verbal dueling and social commentary within a specific cultural context. They argue that these ritual insults, while seemingly aggressive, are actually governed by strict rules that prev…
Cognition and Componential Analysis
Maximization Theories and the Study of Economic Anthropology1
Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication [and Comments and Reply]
Rengsanggri; Family and Kinship in a Garo Village
Language Development of a Garo and English Speaking Child
1959). Language Development of a Garo and English Speaking Child. WORD: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 45-68
The Metrics of Children's Verse
Nursery rhymes in many languages consist of verses of four lines, and each line has four major "beats." The beats are spaced evenly in time and are usually marked by syllables with stress or with some other phonological distinction that sets them off from surrounding syllables, but rests occur in a few beat positions. Each language has its own special characteristics within this general pattern, but the similarities between languages seem greater…
Glottogenesis and Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens
Linguistics and Ethnographic Description1
The anthropological activity of providing ethnographic descriptions is much like the linguistic activity of providing grammatical descriptions. Both offer rules that account for the occurrence of some phenomena (such as, for instance, particular household types or particular sequences of vocal noises), but at the same time rule others out. How the rules are "discovered" is irrelevant to their status, and their degree of cognitive reality need not…
Proto Lolo-Burmese
Burmese Kinship Terminology1
A Structural Restatement of Njamal Kinship Terminology
On the Evolution of Language
Garo Marriage to the Wife's Daughter
American Kinship Terms Once More
The several formal analyses that have been made of American kinship terminology have 1) failed to account for the variable usage of either children or adults, 2) failed to capitalize upon the natural colloquial ability of all speakers to provide verbal definitions of some terms, and 3) been rather overburdened with abstruse symbolic notation. By approaching terminological usage as a system built by means of a sequence of principles (a sequence th…
Burling's Rejoinder
The Addition of Final Stops in the History of Maru (Tibeto-Burman)
It has become commonplace in historical linguistics to recognize instances in which final consonants have been lost from the ends of words. When inspecting sets of apparent cognates which differ only in that one language has final stops which are missing in the other, few linguists would hesitate to conclude that the stopped items represent the older form. More specifically, among the Tibeto-Burman languages, where some languages have a much full…
On Language in Society
Some Outlandish Proposals for the Teaching of Foreign Languages
Three propositions which bear upon second language learning are defended: (1) Some students need or desire only to be able to read and it is legitimate to design courses for such students which omit training in oral skills unless these help with reading. (2) Passive linguistic knowledge can develop far ahead of active ability, and this fact can be exploited when teaching reading by not demanding the simultaneous ability to write. (3) A number of …
Garo Avuncular Authority and Matrilateral Cross-cousin Marriage1
Personal Names in a Mande (Garo) Village
The Mandes (Garos), a hill people of northeastern India, have had no fixed inventory of personal names. Instead of choosing a conventional name for a child, parents try to find a sequence of sounds that has rarely or never before been used to name a Mande. Given names often reveal the person's gender but they rarely have any other meaning. Kinship group names, by contrast, are shared by hundreds or even thousands of others. Thus, given names are …
Understanding a Mandi Story
A proposal for computer-assisted instruction in vocabulary
An Introductory Course in Reading French
Students who wish to read French and who are willing to omit instruction in the spoken language have learned successfully by using texts that are mixtures of French and English. The texts begin with English words in French word order, and in subsequent passages a few French words are substituted for the English words. Later the proportion of French gradually rises. The method has the advantage that adult students can practice from the beginning w…
Linguistics
Garo Avuncular Authority and Matrilateral Cross-cousin Marriage1
Proto-Bodo
In the state of Assam, India, and in adjoining Tripura, a number of Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects are spoken which are generally referred to collectively as the Bodo group. The linguistic affinity of these languages has been recognized for over a century, and from time to time comparative vocabulary lists from two or more of the languages have been published to demonstrate their relation to each other and, more broadly, to other languages …
Language Development of a Garo and English Speaking Child
1959). Language Development of a Garo and English Speaking Child. WORD: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 45-68
Linguistics
Ethnology and Ethnography
General and Ethnology
Outline of Khmu? Structure
A Structural Restatement of Njamal Kinship Terminology
Maximization Theories and the Study of Economic Anthropology1
General and Ethnology
Rengsanggri
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas
A Garo grammar
Garo Kinship Terms and the Analysis of Meaning
In this paper I present a somewhat elaborate analysis of the meaning of the kinship terms of a single society.1 My aim, however, is not so much to present ethnographic data as to discuss a few of the problems which arise in the study of semantic systems and to illustrate a tech? nique which can simplify the analysis. I find it illuminating to compare the study of meaning to the more extensively developed linguistic study of grammar or syntax. In …
The A pa Tanis and their Neighbours
Rengsanggri; Family and Kinship in a Garo Village
Burling's Rejoinder
Cognition and Componential Analysis
Other
Rengsanggri. Family and Kinship in a Garo Village
Burmese Kinship Terminology1
Linguistics
A Problem in the Phonology of Lahu
Robbins Burling, A Problem in the Phonology of Lahu, Artibus Asiae. Supplementum, Vol. 23, Essays Offered to G. H. Luce by His Colleagues and Friends in Honour of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Volume 1: Papers on Asian History, Religion, Languages, Literature, Music Folklore, and Anthropology (1966), pp. 97-101
The Role of Meaning in the Study of Language
Hill Farms and Padi Fields
Hill Farms and Padi Fields. Life in Mainland Southeast Asia
Philosophy (46 works) · Linguistics (42 works) · Sociology (39 works) · History (37 works) · Computer Science (35 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Library science (23 works) · Citation (22 works) · History (21 works) · Psychology (20 works)