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This volume is the outcome of a workshop on Ancient Egyptian syntax held in Liège in 2011. The contributions deal with several central topics in syntactic analysis – like coordination, control and raising, gradience, or non-expression of participants – but also investigate the relationship between syntax and other domains, from morphology to pragmatics, with special attention to construction types and grammaticalization processes. The studies cover the whole Ancient Egyptian corpus, from Old Egyptian down to Coptic, in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. All of the papers share a common concern, namely, the relationship between form and function in Ancient Egyptian grammar. As such, the papers go beyond the descriptive level and address numerous stimulating ‘why?’ questions.

Egyptian language --- Grammar --- Afroasiatic languages --- Syntax --- Egyptian language - Grammar - Congresses --- Egyptian language - Syntax - Congresses

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The study concerns passive voice in Earlier Egyptian (Old and Middle Egyptian combined), providing a text-based description of the relevant forms and constructions, and of their functions in discourse. It is argued that the passive is not merely a symmetrical pendant to the active, but a complex domain of its own, morphologically, semantically, and in terms of its discourse functions. This is manifest for example in the morphological types of inflectional passives, the productivity of subjectless passive constructions of various sorts, or the interaction of the passive with stative/resultative voice. Passive voice further interacts with aspect: in the unaccomplished, the passive has fewer forms than the active, while in the accomplished a reverse situation is observed. The two inflectional passives in the accomplished—the perfective V-passive (the ‘sDm(w)=f’) and the T-passive of the sDm.n=f (the sDm.n.t=f)—are thus shown to contrast with one another in principled semantic, not syntactic, ways. Major changes affecting passive voice during the history of Earlier Egyptian are discussed: the loss of the prospective V-passive, the spread of T-passives over the perfective V-passive in various environments, and the rise of an ‘impersonal’ subject pronoun .tw out of an inflectional passive marker. The last, a rare change and an instance of de-grammaticalization, is analyzed in details in terms of the processes involved and of the particular intra-linguistic situation that made it possible. Broadening the perspective, relevant elements of the Semitic background are evoked.

Egyptian language --- Afroasiatic languages --- Passive voice --- Voice --- Verb --- Egyptian language - Passive voice --- Egyptian language - Voice --- Egyptian language - Verb

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Middle Egyptian introduces the reader to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of twenty-six essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion, literature, and language. Grammar lessons and cultural essays allows users not only to read hieroglyphic texts but also to understand them, providing the foundation for understanding texts on monuments and reading great works of ancient Egyptian literature. This third edition is revised and reorganized, particularly in its approach to the verbal system, based on recent advances in understanding the language. Illustrations enhance the discussions, and an index of references has been added. These changes and additions provide a complete and up-to-date grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt for specialists in linguistics and other fields.

Egyptian language --- Afroasiatic languages --- Egyptian hieroglyphics --- Hieroglyphics, Egyptian --- Grammar. --- Grammar --- Writing, Hieroglyphic. --- Writing, Hieroglyphic --- Egyptian language - Grammar --- Egyptian language - Writing, Hieroglyphic

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Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has rapidly advanced in recent years, resulting in exciting algorithms for sophisticated processing of text and speech in various languages. Much of this work focuses on English; in this book we address another group of interesting and challenging languages for NLP research: the Semitic languages. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic (206 million native speakers), Amharic (27 million), Hebrew (7 million), Tigrinya (6.7 million), Syriac (1 million) and Maltese (419 thousand). Semitic languages exhibit unique morphological processes, challenging syntactic constructions, and various other phenomena that are less prevalent in other natural languages. These challenges call for unique solutions, many of which are described in this book. The 13 chapters presented in this book bring together leading scientists from several universities and research institutes worldwide. While this book devotes some attention to cutting-edge algorithms and techniques, its primary purpose is a thorough explication of best practices in the field. Furthermore, every chapter describes how the techniques discussed apply to Semitic languages. The book covers both statistical approaches to NLP, which are dominant across various applications nowadays, and the more traditional, rule-based approaches, that were proven useful for several other application domains. We hope that this book will provide a "one-stop-shop'' for all the requisite background and practical advice when building NLP applications for Semitic languages.

Natural language processing (Computer science) --- Semitic languages --- Data processing. --- Afroasiatic languages --- NLP (Computer science) --- Artificial intelligence --- Electronic data processing --- Human-computer interaction --- Semantic computing --- Natural language processing (Computer science). --- Computational linguistics. --- Natural Language Processing (NLP). --- Computational Linguistics. --- Automatic language processing --- Language and languages --- Language data processing --- Linguistics --- Natural language processing (Linguistics) --- Applied linguistics --- Cross-language information retrieval --- Mathematical linguistics --- Multilingual computing --- Data processing