Approaches to Language Typology


Book Description

Language typology is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of human languages and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation. This text offers accounts of the theoretical foundations and findings of leading scholars in this field.




Approaches to Language Typology


Book Description

The collection as a whole provides both a survey of the place of individual typological schools in the historiography of the subject and a comprehensive account of the present state of language typology in an international context. It gives an overview of both the underlying unity of and the differences in the methods employed in the field.




The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II


Book Description

An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.




Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages


Book Description

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.




Approaches to the Typology of Word Classes


Book Description

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.




Language Universals and Linguistic Typology


Book Description

Here, Comrie (linguistics, U. of Southern Cal.) is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, relative clauses, and causative constructions. This second edition takes full account of new research into generative grammatical theory. Acidic paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective


Book Description

The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).




Linguistic Typology


Book Description

This textbook provides a critical introduction to major research topics and current approaches in linguistic typology. It draws on a wide range of cross-linguistic data to describe what linguistic typology has revealed about language in general and about the rich variety of ways in which meaning and expression are achieved in the world's languages.




Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Volume 3


Book Description

The three volumes of Language typology and syntactic description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense; aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized u=in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.




Studies on Reduplication


Book Description

For several reasons, mostly inherent to the different developments of generative grammar, an increasing number of publications have dealt with reduplication in the past 20 years. Reduplication lends itself perfectly as a test field for theories that opt for a non-segmental organization of phonology and morphology. As it happens frequently, then, the discussion centers around a rather small set of data for which alternative analysis are offered, and which themselves are intended to contribute to the foundation of new theoretical developments. The present volume (which goes back to a conference on reduplication at the University of Graz, Austria) offers a broader approach to reduplication not only from different theoretical viewpoints, but especially for its phenomenology. Across theories a number of highly qualified authors deal with formal and functional perspectives, with typological properties, with semantics, comparative issues, the role of reduplication in language acquisition, the acquisition of reduplicative systems, sign languages, creoles and pidgins, general grammatical and cognitive principles; the picture is completed by a series of language or language-family specific studies as on Uto-Aztecan, Salish, Tupi-Guarani, Moroccan and Cairene Arabic, various African languages, Chinese, Turkish, Indo-European, languages from India, etc. The overall scope of the conference was to contribute to a new level of discussion of the phenomenon, across theories and across specializations and interests. Update on Contributor's addresses (PDF)