Direct and indirect explanations of typopological regularities: The case of alignment variations
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Denis Creissels
In the evolution of languages, some changes may lack functional explanations of their own and instead be mechanically triggered by changes occurring in other areas of the grammar. This paper illustrates the necessity to consider indirect explanations of typological regularities on the basis of examples taken from alignment typology, namely: a) in predominantly ergative languages, intransitive constructions with accusative alignment may develop as a result of the coalescence of light verb compounds; b) in predominantly ergative languages as well as in predominantly accusative languages, constructions deviating from the dominant alignment type may originate from elliptical variants of transitive constructions; and c) alignment changes (both from accusative to ergative, and from ergative to accusative) may occur as a consequence of the grammaticalization of TAM periphrases.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Direct and indirect explanations of typopological regularities: The case of alignment variations
- On the constructional semantics of gerundive nominalizations
- Prosody and function of English comment clauses
- The nominalization of adjectives in French: From morphological conversion to categorial mismatch
- The wolf in sheep's clothing: Camouflaged borrowing in Modern German
- Implicational phonological universals
- Richard Hudson: Language networks: The new Word Grammar
- Ricardo Mairal & Juana Gil, eds.: Linguistic universals
- Ineta Savickienė & Wolfgang U. Dressler, eds.: The acquisition of diminutives: A cross-linguistic perspective
- Bert Cornillie (Leuven): Report on the 40th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Joensuu, 29 August—1 September 2007)
- Conference announcement: 41st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
- Publications received
