Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Introduction vii
4. What are we typologists doing? 1
5. The canonical approach in typology* 25
6. What is an empirical theory of linguistic meaning a theory of? 51
7. Language processes, theory and description of language change, and building on the past 81
8. On the part played by human conscious choice in language structure and language evolution 105
9. The challenge of polygrammaticalization for linguistic theory 119
10. On discourse frequency, grammar, and grammaticalization 143
11. On the assumption of the sentence as the basic unit of syntactic structure 169
12. Adpositions as a non-universal category 185
13. Understanding antigemination 203
14. What it means to be rare 235
15. The principle of Functional Transparency in language structure and in language evolution 259
16. The importance of discourse analysis for linguistic theory 285
17. Compounding theories and linguistic diversity 319
18. Inalienability and possessum individuation* 339
19. Resultativeness in English 363
20. Encoding speaker perspective 379
21. Distinguishing between referential and grammatical function in morphological typology 399
22. Index 423