Typology of clausal boundary marking devices
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Jeffrey Heath
Abstract
An important executive function in “language design” is marking the boundaries of embedded clauses, and of clauses (and clause sequences) in the scopal domain of operators such as conditional ‘if’ and negation. Crosslinguistic comparison reveals a range of devices that have this effect, facilitating parsing by listeners. These include (i) prosody, (ii) constituent ordering, (iii) coordination, (iv) boundary-markingmorphemes, and (v) continuousmorphological indexation. The last two are emphasized in this article, with data from Australian and West African languages. Such boundary-marking functions deserve greater recognition in grammatical typology, especially since acoustic analogues have been well-studied by phoneticians.
©Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions in an Australian mixed language
- The typological implications of Bardi complex predicates
- Voice and non-canonical case marking in the expression of event-oriented modality
- Typology of clausal boundary marking devices
- The linguistics of eating and drinking, edited by John Newman
- Passionate typologist of St Petersburg: Vladimir Petrovič Nedjalkov (1928–2009)
- Phonologist, Africanist, typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements (1940–2009)
Articles in the same Issue
- The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions in an Australian mixed language
- The typological implications of Bardi complex predicates
- Voice and non-canonical case marking in the expression of event-oriented modality
- Typology of clausal boundary marking devices
- The linguistics of eating and drinking, edited by John Newman
- Passionate typologist of St Petersburg: Vladimir Petrovič Nedjalkov (1928–2009)
- Phonologist, Africanist, typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements (1940–2009)
