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Typological Studies in Language
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The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues.
The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.
The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.
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Volume 191 in this series
The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues.
The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.
The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.
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Volume 135 in this series
Language isolates provide unique insights into human history and linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, isolates have been studied less exhaustively than non-isolates. The eleven papers gathered in this volume provide new methodological tools in order to better understand isolates, including a detailed, in-depth, up-to-date discussion of what it means to be a language isolate and the criteria by which languages should be classified as isolate. The book also provides a series of techniques, some refined on the basis of former literature, and others new, in order to recover the histories of language isolates. In addition, the papers in this volume advance our knowledge about each of the individual languages studied here, which are, for the most part, endangered and under-documented. This book will appeal to a broad audience spanning typologists, historical linguists, descriptive linguists, and teachers of linguistics.
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Volume 134 in this series
This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. The chapters investigate such events on the basis of spoken language corpora of endangered, underdescribed languages and in this way the volume showcases the importance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. The semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion shows considerable crosslinguistic variation in how meaning components are conflated within single lexemes or distributed across morphemes or clauses. The volume presents a typology of common patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of these events. The study of crosslinguistic event encoding provided in this volume contributes to our understanding of the nature, extent and limits of linguistic and cognitive diversity.
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What is it like? – This is often the first question we ask about any object, and it is typically answered with adjectives: old, smooth, pointed, narrow, etc. Characteristics of things around us is a fundamental aspect of how we conceptualize the physical world, regardless of when or where we live – and regardless of our language. Despite this, the vocabulary of physical qualities has received comparatively little attention in lexical typology: most research so far has focused on verbs and the actions they express.
This volume presents a lexico-typological study of several domains of physical qualities: ‘sharp’/‘blunt’, ‘wet’, ‘empty’/‘full’, ‘old’, as well as dimensions temperature and surface texture. It discusses several theoretical issues including intragenetic language sampling, the possibility of signed vs. spoken language comparison at the lexicon level, and the potential of applying computational models of distributional semantics to lexical typology.
The book will be of interest to linguists with a focus on typology, general and lexical semantics, to lexicographers, and to language students and teachers.
This volume presents a lexico-typological study of several domains of physical qualities: ‘sharp’/‘blunt’, ‘wet’, ‘empty’/‘full’, ‘old’, as well as dimensions temperature and surface texture. It discusses several theoretical issues including intragenetic language sampling, the possibility of signed vs. spoken language comparison at the lexicon level, and the potential of applying computational models of distributional semantics to lexical typology.
The book will be of interest to linguists with a focus on typology, general and lexical semantics, to lexicographers, and to language students and teachers.
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Volume 132 in this series
Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).
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Volume 131 in this series
This volume presents novel cross-linguistic insights into how olfactory experiences are expressed in typologically (un-)related languages both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic and fourteen chapters based on philological investigation and thorough fieldwork data from Basque, Beja, Fon, Formosan languages, Hebrew, Indo-European languages, Japanese, Kartvelian languages, Purepecha, and languages of northern Vanuatu. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve, inter alia, lexical olfactory repertoires and naming strategies, non-literal meanings of olfactory expressions and their semantic change, reduplication, colexification, mimetics, and language contact. The findings provide the reader with a range of fascinating facts about perception description, contribute to a deeper understanding of how olfaction as an understudied sense is encoded linguistically, and offer new theoretical perspectives on how some parts of our cognitive system are verbalized cross-culturally. This volume is highly relevant to lexical typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anthropologists.
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Volume 130 in this series
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction, such as lexical semantics, the properties of the antipassive markers, as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars, in particular to those working in the field of language typology, semantics, syntax, and historical linguists, as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.
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Volume 129 in this series
Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili.
The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.
The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.
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The ‘NP’ is one of the least controversial grammatical units that linguists work with. The NP is often assumed to be universal, and appears to be robust cross-linguistically (compared to ‘VP’ or even ‘clause’) in that it can be manipulated in argument positions in constructed examples. Furthermore, for any given language, its internal structure (order and type of modifiers) tends to be relatively fixed. Surprisingly, however, the empirical basis for ‘NP’ has never been established. The chapters in this volume examine the NP in everyday interactions from diverse languages, including little-studied languages as well as better-researched ones, in a variety of interactional settings. Together, these chapters show that cross-linguistically, the category NP is not as robust as has been assumed: in the context of temporally unfolding human interaction, its structural status is constantly negotiated in terms of participants’ evolving social agendas.
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This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological, syntactic, and semantic literature, namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead, they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect, it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly, this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics, demonstrating how, on the one hand, the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how, on the other hand, an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.
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This volume surveys the phenomenon of syntactic complexity in a diversity of languages and from a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The topics include clause combining strategies such as relative, complement, and adverbial clauses, serialization, clausal nominalizations, but also the switch reference systems involved in clause chains, the role of insubordination and the influence of language contact in the development of syntactic complexity as well as the acquisition of complex clauses in child language and the grammaticalization processes leading to syntactic complexity. These studies illustrate the varied aspects involved in clause combining and help to understand how syntactic complexity works and evolves in the world’s languages, how it varies across languages, how it is influenced by language contact, how it is acquired. As such, this book gives the opportunity for readers to expand both their typological and their theoretical knowledge about syntactic complexity in a variety of languages.
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The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.
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Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas, yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship, which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right, and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages, with focus on South America, examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions, their internal and external syntax, and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.
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Volume 123 in this series
Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations, the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties, argument selector, as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates, referential properties of arguments, as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.
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This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data, generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages, it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand, it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other, it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages, which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights, either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions, or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview, and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.
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Typological hierarchies are widely perceived as one of the most important results of research on language universals and linguistic diversity. Explanations for typological hierarchies, however, are usually based on the synchronic properties of the patterns described by individual hierarchies, not the actual diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns cross-linguistically. This book aims to explore in what ways the investigation of such processes can further our understanding of typological hierarchies. To this end, diachronic evidence about the origins of several phenomena described by typological hierarchies is discussed for several languages by a number of leading scholars in typology, historical linguistics, and language documentation. This evidence suggests a rethinking of possible explanations for typological hierarchies, as well as the very notion of typological universals in general. For this reason, the book will be of interest not only to the broad typological community, but also historical linguists, cognitive linguists, and psycholinguists.
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This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian, Huasteca Nahuatl, Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri, and works dealing with specific valency change constructions, such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl, resultatives in Yaqui, antipassives in Mocoví, and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon, together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.
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This volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume presents large sets of new data and insights into the use of the essive in nineteen Uralic languages on the basis of a typological linguistic questionnaire. The typological variation is discussed within the linguistic domains of non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The descriptions and analyses are presented in such a way that they are accessible to linguists in general, descriptive and theoretical linguists, and specialists in Uralic and/or linguistic typology. The data and approach offer many starting points for further investigations within but also outside the Uralic language family.
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Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically, a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs, while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages, egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world, including languages of Western China, the Andean region of South America, the Caucasus, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective, interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation.
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While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades, the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in typologically and genetically distant languages, albeit with a focus on Africa, and from a range of perspectives. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that also shed light on the diachronic development of similative and equative constructions in language contact situations. Sources of similative morphemes and lexically expressed concepts of likeness are examined, and little-known multifunctionality patterns and grammaticalisation targets of similative morphemes – such as purpose clause markers, modality morphemes and markers of glottonyms – are discussed. Based on a sample of 119 languages worldwide, a new typology of equative constructions is proposed. The book should be of interest to typologists, semanticists, specialists of grammaticalization, historical linguistics and syntax.
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This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that, in any language, adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction, some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction (GNMCC) -- a single construction covering a wide range of semantic relations between the head noun and the clause. Through in-depth examination of naturally-occurring and elicited data from Ainu, languages of the Caucasus (e.g. Ingush, Georgian, Bezhta, Hinuq), Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Nenets, Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Cantonese, Mandarin, Rawang), and Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Sakha), the chapters discuss whether or not the language in question exhibits a GNMCC and the range of noun modification covered by such a construction. The findings afford us new facts, new theoretical perspectives and the first step toward a more global assessment of the possibilities for GNMCCs.
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The phenomenon of insubordination can be defined diachronically as the recruitment of main clause structures from subordinate structures, or synchronically as the independent use of constructions exhibiting characteristics of subordinate clauses. Long marginalised as uncomfortable exceptions, insubordinated clause phenomena turn out to be surprisingly widespread, and provide a vital empirical testing ground for various central theoretical issues in current linguistics – the interplay of langue and parole, the emergence of structure, the question of where productive syntactic rules give way to constructions, the role of prosody in language change, and the question of how far grammars are produced by isolated speakers as opposed to being collaboratively constructed in dialogue. This volume – the first book-length treatment on the topic – assembles studies of languages on all continents, by scholars who bring a range of approaches to bear on the topic, from historical linguistics to corpus studies to typology to conversational analysis.
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Switch reference is a grammatical process that marks a referential relationship between arguments of two (or more) verbs. Typically it has been characterized as an inflection pattern on the verb itself, encoding identity or non-identity between subject arguments separately from traditional person or number marking. In the 50 years since William Jacobsen’s coinage of the term, switch reference has evolved from an exotic phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages to a widespread feature found in geographically and linguistically unconnected parts of the world. The growing body of information on the topic raises new theoretical and empirical questions about the development, functions, and nature of switch reference, as well as the internal variation between different switch-reference systems. The contributions to this volume discuss these and other questions for a wide variety of languages from all over the world, and endevaour to demonstrate the full functional and morphosyntactic range of the phenomenon.
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This volume addresses the relation between finiteness and nominalization, which is far more complex than the simple opposition finite-nonfinite. The contributions analyze finiteness cross-linguistically from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, focusing on a number of topics that has not been thoroughly explored in the literature. First, the correlation between finiteness and nominalization is also affected by a third factor, information structure. Second, there is a correlation between the continuum of finiteness and the scale from main/independent clauses to dependent clauses. Given that of nominalized constructions occur not only in dependent clauses, but also in independent clauses, it is possible to grade according to degree of nominalization, which can then be related to the scale of finiteness. Finally, each of these scales can also be seen as a product the diachronic process of re-finitization and of finitization.
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This volume presents a state-of-the-art survey of synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Ergativity in the Indo-Aryan language family. It contains an introduction drawing on the most important recent typological and theoretical contributions to this field, plus seven papers about the origin, development and distribution of ergative alignment in ancient and modern Indo-Aryan languages written by well-established expert authors. The articles provide detailed explorations of language-specific synchronic systems or patterns of change, and large-scale studies of the distribution of ergative morphosyntax across the Indo-Aryan languages. The papers have a typological-functional approach and are based on thorough fieldwork experience and/or philological investigation. As the Indo-Aryan language family has played a paramount role in recent theories of Ergativity and of alignment typology and change, this volume is highly relevant to experts working on these languages and to scholars interested in grammatical relations and it will figure in all future debates in these fields
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The main aim of this book is to address a fundamental question in linguistics, namely why languages are similar and why they are different. The study proposes that languages are fundamentally similar when they encode the same meanings in their grammatical systems and that languages are different when they encode different meanings. Even if languages encode the same meaning, they may differ with respect to the formal means used to code those meanings. This approach allows for a typology based on functional domains, subdomains and functions coded in individual languages. The outcome of the study is a unified approach to language theory, linguistic typology, and descriptive linguistics. The argumentation for the hypotheses and the proposed approach is supported by analyses of data from more than a dozen languages, including English, Polish, French, Wandala, Mina, Hdi, and several other Chadic languages. The study is accessible to a wide variety of linguists.
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Zapotec languages present a wide range of lexical, morphological, phonological, and syntactic means of indicating valence changes. Despite their significant theoretical interest, detailed descriptions of valence-changing phenomena in Zapotec are rare, comparative studies are practically non-existent, and Zapotec contributions to the general typology of valence-changing phenomena still remain largely untapped. The present volume addresses this imbalance by being the first to explore Zapotec valence-changing constructions in depth, and to highlight their broad comparative, typological, and theoretical significance. This book contains both write-ups of contributions to the Special Session on Valence-Changing Devices in Zapotecan (annual meeting of SSILA, 2012) and specially commissioned chapters. It will be of interest to Zapotecanists, Otomangueanists, Mesoamericanists, typologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, and general linguists with an interest in valence-changing phenomena, and may also be used as supplementary reading in field methods and typology courses.
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Certain grammatical elements help hearers know how propositions are conceptually related: Does a given proposition advance the foregrounded event line, or not? Initiate versus continue an event chain? Indicate that one proposition belongs to a different "mental space" from the previous one? Provide background information? Studies in this volume show that African languages sometimes support, but often refute the idea that perfective aspect or past tense marks the narrative event line. Rather, languages may employ clause level constructions, conjunctions or connectives, tonal melodies on verbs or subjects, specialized auxiliaries, special verb forms and even dependent clause and imperfective aspect forms. Often, correlation of such grammatical elements with the event line is a subcase of a more general function. Analyses in this volume contribute to developing a typology of the expression of discourse functions, a field of research which has so far been minimally addressed from a typological perspective.
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The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.
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The volume is the first comprehensive typological study of the conceptualisation of temperature in languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms (hot, cold, to freeze, etc.). The key issues addressed here include questions such as how languages categorize the temperature domain and what other uses the temperature expressions may have, e.g., when metaphorically referring to emotions (‘warm words’). The volume contains studies of more than 50 genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages and is unique in considering cross-linguistic patterns defined both by lexical and grammatical information. The detailed descriptions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic facts will serve as an important step in teasing apart the role of the different factors in how we speak about temperature – neurophysiology, cognition, environment, social-cultural practices, genetic relations among languages, and linguistic contact. The book is a significant contribution to semantic typology, and will be of interest for linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers.
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Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now, starting with determining their kind and number, with their morphological expression, and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents, on the regularity of, and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles, the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages, presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages, on semantic roles in word formation, and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles, with the syntax-semantics interface, and with semantic change and grammaticalization.
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This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure and reference tracking – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On the one hand, a complex sentence can be studied as a mini-unit of discourse consisting of two or more elements describing events, situations, or processes, with its own internal information-structural and referential organization. On the other hand, complex sentences can be studied as parts of larger discourse structures, such as narratives or conversations, in terms of how their information-structural characteristics relate to this wider context. The book offers new perspectives for the study of the interaction between complex sentences and information management, and moreover adds typological breadth by focusing on lesser studied languages from several parts of the world.
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What is the range of diversity in linguistic types, what are the geographical distributions for the attested types, and what explanations, based on shared history or universals, can account for these distributions? This collection of articles by prominent scholars in typology seeks to address these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology. The phenomena considered range from the phonological to the morphosyntactic, the areal coverage ranges in scale from micro-areal to worldwide, and the types of historical contingency range from contact-based to genealogical in nature. Together, the papers argue strongly for a view in which, although they use distinct methodologies, linguistic typology and historical linguistics are one and the same enterprise directed at discovering how languages came to be the way they are and how linguistic types came to be distributed geographically as they are.
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Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical linguistics, and function-based approaches to language description define this volume, as does its foci in two major geographical areas — southeast Asia and northwestern North America. All of the papers appeal, in one way or another, to functional-historical approaches to explanation. Behind this appeal lies an assumption that languages are selective in their development in ways that are dependent upon the communicative tasks to which they are put. As such, language function accounts for both variation and historical development over time.
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Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.
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This book presents a comprehensive survey of historically attested relative clause constructions from a diachronic typological perspective. Systematic integration of historical data and a typological approach demonstrates how typology and historical linguistics can each benefit from attention to the other. The diachronic behaviour of relative clauses is mapped across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. Central to the discussion is the strength of evidence for what have previously been claimed to be ‘natural’ or even ‘universal’ pathways of change. While many features of relative clause constructions are found to be remarkably stable over long periods of time, it is shown that language contact seems to be the crucial factor that does trigger change when it occurs. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. The findings of this study have implications for the definition of relative clauses, their syntactic structures and the relationships between the different ‘subtypes’ of this construction, as well as offering new directions for the integration of typological and historical linguistic research.
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Volume 100 in this series
Events of putting things in places, and removing them from places, are fundamental activities of human experience. But do speakers of different languages construe such events in the same way when describing them? This volume investigates placement and removal event descriptions from 18 areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages. Each chapter describes the lexical and grammatical means used to describe such events, and further investigates one of the following themes: syntax-semantics mappings, lexical semantics, and asymmetries in the encoding of placement versus removal events. The chapters demonstrate considerable crosslinguistic variation in the encoding of this domain, as well as commonalities, e.g. in the semantic distinctions that recur across languages, and in the asymmetric treatment of placement versus removal events. This volume provides a significant contribution within the emerging field of semantic typology, and will be of interest to researchers interested in the language-cognition interface, including linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.
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Volume 99 in this series
The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case, animacy and semantic roles, thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies, these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena, such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition, theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example, what is case, how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages, Indo-European languages, Basque, Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case, animacy and/or semantic roles.
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Volume 98 in this series
Reciprocals are an increasingly hot topic in linguistic research. This reflects the intersection of several factors: the semantic and syntactic complexity of reciprocal constructions, their centrality to some key points of linguistic theorizing (such as Binding Conditions on anaphors within Government and Binding Theory), and the centrality of reciprocity to theories of social structure, human evolution and social cognition. No existing work, however, tackles the question of exactly what reciprocal constructions mean cross-linguistically. Is there a single, Platonic ‘reciprocal’ meaning found in all languages, or is there a cluster of related concepts which are nonetheless impossible to characterize in any single way? That is the central goal of this volume, and it develops and explains new techniques for tackling this question. At the same time, it confronts a more general problem facing semantic typology: how to investigate a category cross-linguistically without pre-loading the definition of the phenomenon on the basis of what is found in more familiar languages.
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Volume 97 in this series
In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.
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Volume 96 in this series
Research on nominalization, a process that gives rise to referring expressions, has always played a central role in linguistic investigations. Over the years there has also been growing evidence that nominalization constructions often extend to non-referential domains. They participate in noun-modifying expressions (e.g. genitive and relative clauses), subordinate clauses and topic constructions, finite structures with the nominalizers reanalyzed as TAM markers, and stance constructions with evaluative, attitudinal, evidential and epistemic overtones. This volume brings together historical and crosslinguistic evidence from more than 20 different languages representing six different language families spanning the Asian continent and the Pacific and Indian oceans to elucidate the strategies and grammaticalization pathways that give rise to both referential and non-referential uses of nominalization constructions. This collection highlights the diversity of strategies and at the same time the robust cyclical nature of change within and across languages. The combined diachronic and typological analyses in this volume are particularly valuable for linguistic research on diachronic morphosyntax and linguistic ‘universals’, and are also an important supplementary cross-referencing tool for linguistic investigations of versatile and ubiquitous morphemes in under-documented languages.
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Volume 95 in this series
Since creole languages draw their properties from both their substrate and superstrate sources, the typological classification of creoles has long been a major issue for creolists, typologists, and linguists in general. Several contradictory proposals have been put forward in the literature. For example, creole languages typologically pair with their superstrate languages (Chaudenson 2003), with their substrate languages (Lefebvre 1998), or even, creole languages are alike (Bickerton 1984) such that they constitute a “definable typological class” (McWhorter 1998). This book contains 25 chapters bearing on detailed comparisons of some 30 creoles and their substrate languages. As the substrate languages of these creoles are typologically different, the detailed investigation of substrate features in the creoles leads to a particular answer to the question of how creoles should be classified typologically. The bulk of the data show that creoles reproduce the typological features of their substrate languages. This argues that creoles cannot be claimed to constitute a definable typological class.
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Volume 94 in this series
This collective volume focuses on the crucial role of formal evidence in recognizing and explaining instances of grammaticalization. It addresses the hitherto neglected issue of system-internal factors steering grammaticalization and also revisits formal recognition criteria such as Lehmann and Hopper’s parameters of grammaticalization. The articles investigate developments of such phenomena as modal auxiliaries, attitudinal markers, V1-conditionals, nominalizers, and pronouns, using data from a wide range of languages and (in some cases) from diachronic corpora. In the process, they explore finer mechanisms of grammaticalization such as modification of coding means, structural and semantic analogy, changes in frequency and prosody, and shifts in collocational and grammatical distribution. The volume is of particular interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization, and general linguists working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.
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Volume 93 in this series
Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However, while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace, placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally, fillers can function as a pragmatic tool, in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations, including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.
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Volume 92 in this series
Benefactives are constructions used to express that a state of affairs holds to someone’s advantage. The same construction sometimes also serves as a malefactive, whose meanings are generally not a simple mirror image of the benefactive. Benefactive constructions cover a wide range of phenomena: malefactive passives, general and specialized benefactive cases and adpositions, serial verb constructions and converbal constructions (including e.g. verbs of giving and taking), benefactive applicatives, and other morphosyntactic strategies. The present book is the first collection of its kind to be published on this topic. It includes both typological surveys and in-depth descriptive studies, exploring both the morphosyntactic properties and the semantic nuances of phenomena ranging from the familiar English double-object construction and the Japanese adversative passive to comparable phenomena found in lesser-known languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The book will appeal to typologists and linguists interested in linguistic diversity and it will also be a useful reference work for linguists working on language description.
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Volume 91 in this series
This book analyzes the different patterns found across subsaharan Africa to express information structure. Based on languages from all four African language phyla, it documents the great diversity of linguistic means used to encode information-structural phenomena and is therefore highly relevant for some of the most pertinent questions in modern linguistic theory. The special contribution of this volume is the perspective on a variety of information-structurally related phenomena which go far beyond classical notions such as focus and topic. Detailed investigations are dedicated to so far less discussed focal subcategories, like focus on verbal operators or the thetic-categorical distinction. Finally, the information-structural configuration of unmarked, canonical sentence structures is recognized. The papers provide evidence that the formal means to encode information-structural categories range from means such as morphological markers or syntactic operations, famous in linguistics, to less well-known strategies, such as defocalization rather than focalization.
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Volume 90 in this series
This volume, which emerged from a workshop at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 conference held at KU Leuven in July 2008, contains a collection of papers which investigate the relationship between synchronic gradience and the apparent gradualness of linguistic change, largely from the perspective of grammaticalization. In addition to versions of the papers presented at the workshop, the volume contains specially commissioned contributions, some of which offer commentaries on a subset of the other articles. The articles address a number of themes central to grammaticalization studies, such as the role of reanalysis and analogy in grammaticalization, the formal modelling of grammaticalization, and the relationship between formal and functional change, using data from a range of languages, and (in some cases) from particular electronic corpora. The volume will be of specific interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization, and general linguists working on the interface between synchrony and diachrony.
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Volume 89 in this series
This volume presents a typological/theoretical introduction plus eight papers about ergative alignment in 16 Amazonian languages. All are written by linguists with years of fieldwork and comparative experience in the region, all describe details of the synchronic systems, and several also provide diachronic insight into the evolution of these systems. The five papers in Part I focus on languages from four larger families with ergative patterns primarily in morphology. The typological contribution is in detailed consideration of unusual splits, changes in ergative patterns, and parallels between ergative main clauses and nominalizations. The three papers in Part II discuss genetically isolated languages. Two present dominant ergative patterns in both morphology and syntax, the other a syntactic inverse system that is predominantly ergative in discourse. In each, the authors demonstrate that identification of traditional grammatical relations is problematic. These data will figure in all future typological and theoretical debates about grammatical relations.
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Volume 88 in this series
This book presents the first comprehensive typology of purpose clause constructions in the world’s languages. Based on a stratified variety sample of 80 languages, it uncovers the unity and diversity of the morphosyntactic means by which purposive relations are coded, and discusses the status of purpose clauses in the syntactic and conceptual space of complex sentences. Explanations for significantly recurrent coding patterns are couched in a usage-based approach to language structure, which pays due attention to the cognitive and communicative pressures on usage events involving purpose clauses, to frequency distributions of grammatical choices in corpora, and to the ways in which usage preferences conventionalize in pathways of diachronic change. The book integrates diverse previous strands of research on purpose clauses with a thorough empirical analysis in its own right and thus reflects the current state of the art of crosslinguistic research into this distinctive type of adverbial clause.
An appendix to A Typology of Purpose Clauses can be found on the author's website: www.kschmidtkebode.de/purpose.html
An appendix to A Typology of Purpose Clauses can be found on the author's website: www.kschmidtkebode.de/purpose.html
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Volume 87 in this series
This volume deals with issues on negation patterns in languages of West Africa and the adjacent north and east. The first aim is to provide data on various aspects of negation in African languages. Although the topics addressed here reflect a great diversity of negation patterns, the following typological features have been identified to be prominent in our region: conflict or even incompatibility between negation and focus, use of other indirect means of negating non-indicative mood (covered under the term ‘Prohibitive’), different negation patterns in different Tense-Aspect-Moods (e.g. Imperfective vs. Perfective), lack of negative indefinites, and disjunctive negative marking (often referred to as ‘double negation’). The articles presented here show that areal factors have played a significant role in the development of negation strategies in the languages of West Africa and beyond. On the other hand genetic factors seem to be less prominent.
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Volume 86 in this series
This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in general linguistic terms, particularly with regard to polysynthesis. The degree of variation from more to less polysynthesis is evaluated within Eskaleut (Inuit-Yupik vs. Aleut), even in previously insufficiently explored domains such as pragmatics and use in context – including language contact and learning situations – and over typologically related language families such as Athabascan, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Iroquoian, Uralic, and Wakashan.
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Volume 85 in this series
Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.
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Volume 84 in this series
This volume reviews a range of fascinating linguistic facts about ingestive predicates in the world’s languages. The highly multifaceted nature of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ events gives rise to interesting clausal properties of these predicates, such as the atypicality of transitive constructions involving ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in some languages. The two verbs are also sources for a large number of figurative uses across languages with meanings such as ‘destroy’, and ‘savour’, as well as participating in a great variety of idioms which can be quite opaque semantically. Grammaticalized extensions of these predicates also occur, such as the quantificational use of Hausa shaa 'drink’ meaning (roughly) ‘do X frequently, regularly’. Specialists discuss details of the use of these verbs in a variety of languages and language families: Australian languages, Papuan languages, Athapaskan languages, Japanese, Korean, Hausa, Amharic, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi.
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Volume 83 in this series
This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.
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Volume 82 in this series
This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.
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Volume 81 in this series
The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.
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Volume 80 in this series
The study of clause combining has been advanced lately by increasing interest in the study of actual language use in a typologically diverse set of languages. A number of received understandings have been challenged, among these the idea of clause combinations as being divisible into subordination and coordination in a binary fashion. Connected to this idea is the nature of conjunctions, a topic treated in several articles here. Couched within the larger issue of the nature of categoriality in language, several of the papers show that conjunctions are highly polyfunctional items, and that clause combining is only one of the uses to which speakers put them. Other topics treated in the volume are the historical development of conjunctions and the use of formulaic main clause constructions as projective units in conversation. The articles manifest both typological and theoretical breadth. They are based on data from Bulgarian, English, Estonian, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Spanish. The theoretical approaches include discourse-functional, interactional, historical and generative linguistics.
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Volume 79 in this series
The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading, whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However, in marked contexts such as negated ones, the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not, or only partially, bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German, Slavic, Armenian), African, Asian, Amerindian, and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.
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Volume 78 in this series
This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our common human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language, and is now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic facts - paradigms, affixes, vowel patterns - while pointing out the theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this, they reflect on the social and human dimensions, discussing particular problems of nostalgia and modernity, memory and forgetting, and obsolescence and ethics, while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.
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Volume 77 in this series
This volume and its companion oneRethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization, held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization entails via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions. Some of the theoretical issues discussed in the sixteen articles included in the volume are the nature of grammaticalization and related processes such as anti-, re- and degrammaticalization, the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization, the role of frequency in grammaticalization and the interplay between information structure and grammaticalization. Other topics covered are the grammaticalization of composite predicates in English, the emergence of modal particles in German and particle clusters in Dutch and the grammaticalization of various modal auxiliaries in Spanish and in Swedish.
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Volume 76 in this series
This volume and its companion one Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization, held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. From the rich programme of the conference (over 120 papers), the twelve contributions included in this volume were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in grammaticalization and suggest possible directions for future investigations in the field. Combining theoretical discussions with the analysis of particular test cases from a wide range of languages from various language families, the selected papers focus on such central questions as the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization, the distorting effects of grammaticalization on grammar, the areal perspective in grammaticalization and the relevance of contact-induced change to grammaticalization. Other topics discussed include the development of markers of textual connectivity and the emergence of cardinal numerals and numeral systems.
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Volume 75 in this series
The present volume deals with hitherto unexplored issues on the interaction of morphology and syntax. These selected and invited papers mainly concern Cushitic and Chadic languages, the least-described members of the Afroasiatic family. Three papers in the volume explore one or more typological characteristics across an entire language family or branch, while others focus on one or two languages within a family and the implications of their structures for the family, the phylum, or linguistic typology as a whole. The diversity of topics addressed within the present volume reflects the great diversity of language structures and functions within the Afroasiatic phylum.
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Volume 74 in this series
This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.
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Volume 73 in this series
Deconstructing Creole is a collection of studies aimed at critically assessing the idea of creole languages as a homogeneous structural type with shared and peculiar patterns of genesis. Following up on the critical discussion of notions of ‘creole exceptionalism’ as historical and ideological constructs, this volume tests the basic assumptions that underlie current attempts to present ‘creole structure’ as a special type, from typological as well as sociohistorical perspectives. The sum of the findings presented here suggests that careful empirical investigation of input varieties and contact environments can explain the structural output without recourse to an exceptional genesis scenario. Echoing calls to dissolve the notion of ‘creolization’ as a special diachronic process, this volume proposes that theoretically grounded approaches to the notions of simplicity, complexity, transmission, etc. do not warrant considering so-called ‘creole’ languages as a special synchronic type.
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This book presents a functional analysis of a notion which has gained considerable importance in cognitive and functional linguistics over the last couple of decades, namely 'prototypical transitivity'. It discusses what prototypical transitivity is, why it should exist, and how it should be defined, as well as how this definition can be employed in the analysis of a number of phenomena of language, such as case-marking, experiencer constructions, and so-called ambitransitives. Also discussed is how a prototype analysis relates to other approaches to transitivity, such as that based on markedness. The basic claim is that transitivity is iconic: a construction with two distinct, independent arguments is prototypically used to refer to an event with two distinct, independent participants. From this principle, a unified account of the properties typically associated with transitivity can be derived, and an explanation for why these properties tend to correlate across languages can be given.
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Volume 71 in this series
This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other, The poets admire each other’s poems) have often been the subject of language-particular studies, but it is only in this work that a truly global comparative picture emerges. Nine stage-setting chapters dealing with general and theoretical matters are followed by 40 chapters containing in-depth descriptions of reciprocals in individual languages by renowned specialists. The introductory papers provide a conceptual and terminological framework that allows the authors of the individual chapters to characterize their languages in comparable terms, making it easy for the reader to see points of commonality between languages and constructions that have never been compared before. This set of volumes is an indispensable starting point and will be a lasting reference work for any future studies of reciprocals.
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This book proposes a notion of inverse that differs from two widespread positions found in descriptive and typological studies (one of them restrictive and structure-oriented, the other broad and function-centered). This third stance put forward here takes both grammar and pragmatic functions into account, but it also relates the opposition between direct and inverse verbs and clauses to an opposition between deictic values, thereby achieving two advantageous goals: it meaningfully circumvents one of the usual analytic dilemmas, namely whether a given construction is passive or inverse, and it refines our understanding of the cross-linguistic typology of inversion. This framework is applied to the description of the morphosyntax of eleven Amerindian languages (Algonquian: Plains Cree, Miami-Illinois, Ojibwa; Kutenai; Sahaptian: Sahaptin, Nez Perce; Kiowa-Tanoan: Arizona Tewa, PicurÃs, Southern Tiwa, Kiowa; Mapudungun).
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Volume 69 in this series
The alternation between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE, which this collection examines, is often discussed in connection with generative analyses of split intransitivity. But this book's purpose is to place the phenomenon in a broader context. Well-known facts in the Romance and Germanic language families are extended with data from lesser studied languages and dialects (Romanian, Paduan), and also with experimental and historical data. Moreover, the book goes beyond the usual language families in which the phenomenon has been studied, with the inclusion of two chapters on Chinese and Korean. The theoretical background of the contributors is also broad, ranging from current Generative approaches to Cognitive and Optimality-Theoretical frameworks. Readers interested in the structural, historical, developmental, or experimental aspects of auxiliary selection should profit from this book's comprehensive empirical coverage and from the plurality of contemporary linguistic analyses it contains.
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Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative,perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, Modern Structuralist Approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Distributed Morphology, and Case Grammar have been applied by the different authors.
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This book examines stem change in verb paradigms, as in English go 'go.PRESENT' vs. went 'go.PAST', a phenomenon referred to as suppletion in current linguistic theory. The work is based on a broad sample of 193 languages, and examines this long neglected phenomenon from a typological perspective. In addition to identifying types of suppletion which occur cross-linguistically, the study brings to light areal patterns of the occurrence of suppletive forms in verb paradigms. Several hypotheses as regards the diachronic development of suppletive forms are presented as well. The author also seeks to explore the methodological issues of evaluating the frequency of linguistic features in large language samples by introducing a method of weighting languages according to their genetic relatedness. All figures obtained in this way are compared to the proportions yielded by more familiar counting methods, and the results and implications of the different procedures are compared and discussed throughout.
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Space is presently the focus of much research and debate across disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. One strong feature of this collection is to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions from these varied scientific traditions, with the collective aim of addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of the current literature: the nature of space in language, the linguistic relativity of space, the relation between spatial language and cognition. Linguistic analyses highlight the multidimensional and heterogeneous nature of space, while also showing the existence of a set of types, parameters, and principles organizing the considerable diversity of linguistic systems and accounting for mechanisms of diachronic change. Findings concerning spatial perception and cognition suggest the existence of two distinct systems governing linguistic and non-linguistic representations, that only partially overlap in some pathologies, but they also show the strong impact of language-specific factors on the course of language acquisition and cognitive development.
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This volume presents thirteen original papers dealing with various aspects of two related areas of research of major concern to linguists of all theoretical persuasions: voice and grammatical relations. The papers are written from typological, functional, and cognitive perspectives, and contain a number of general studies as well as studies focusing on specific issues, and offer a wealth of data from a broad range of languages. The volume provides up-to-date discussions of an array of issues of theoretical concern, including the nature of grammatical relations, voice in agent/patient systems, the expression vs. non-expression of participant roles, and personal vs. impersonal passives. The papers in the volume demonstrate that investigations into the nature of voice and grammatical relations can still yield fresh theoretical and typological insights.
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Volume 64 in this series
The twenty-one papers that make up this volume reflect the broad perspective of African linguistic typology studies today. Where previous volumes would present language material from a very restricted area and perspective, the present contributions reflect the global interest and orientation of current African linguistic studies. The studies are nearly all implicational in nature. Based upon a detailed survey of a particular linguistic phenomenon in a given language or language area conclusions are drawn about the general nature about this phenomenon in the languages of Africa and beyond. They represent as such a first step that may ultimately lead to a more thorough understanding of African linguistic structures. This approach is well justified. Taking the other road, attempting to pick out linguistic details from often fairly superficially documented languages runs the risk that the data and its implications for the structure investigated might be misunderstood. Consequentially only very few studies of this nature giving the very broad perspective, the overview of a particular structure type covering the whole African continent are represented here.
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Volume 63 in this series
This book presents a collection of papers on clusivity, a newly coined term for the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Clusivity is a widespread feature familiar from descriptive grammars and frequently figuring in typological schemes and diachronic scenarios. However, no comprehensive exploration of it has been available so far. This book is intended to make the first step towards a better understanding of the inclusive–exclusive opposition, by documenting the current linguistic knowledge on the topic.
The issues discussed include the categorial and paradigmatic status of the opposition, its geographical distribution, realization in free vs bound pronouns, inclusive imperatives, clusivity in the 2nd person, honorific uses of the distinction, etc. These case studies are complemented by the analysis of the opposition in American Sign Language as opposed to spoken languages. In-depth areal and family surveys of clusivity consider this opposition in Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, central-western South American, Turkic languages, and in Mosetenan and Shuswap.
The issues discussed include the categorial and paradigmatic status of the opposition, its geographical distribution, realization in free vs bound pronouns, inclusive imperatives, clusivity in the 2nd person, honorific uses of the distinction, etc. These case studies are complemented by the analysis of the opposition in American Sign Language as opposed to spoken languages. In-depth areal and family surveys of clusivity consider this opposition in Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, central-western South American, Turkic languages, and in Mosetenan and Shuswap.
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Volume 62 in this series
This collection of original papers by eminent phoneticians, linguists and sociologists offers the most recent findings on phonetic design in interactional discourse available in an edited collection. The chapters examine the organization of phonetic detail in relation to social actions in talk-in-interaction based on data drawn from diverse languages: Japanese, English, Finnish, and German, as well as from diverse speakers: children, fluent adults and adults with language loss. Because similar methodology is deployed for the investigation of similar conversational tasks in different languages, the collection paves the way towards a cross-linguistic phonology for conversation. The studies reported in the volume make it clear that language-specific constraints are at work in determining exactly which phonetic and prosodic resources are deployed for a given purpose and how they articulate with grammar in different cultures and speech communities.
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Volume 61 in this series
Volume 2 of Non-nominative Subjects (NNSs) presents the most recent research on this topic from a wide range of languages from diverse language families of the world, with ample data and in-depth analysis. A significant feature of these volumes is that authors with different theoretical perspectives study the intricate questions raised by these constructions. Some of the central issues include the subject properties of noun phrases with ergative, dative, accusative and genitive case, case assignment and checking, anaphor–antecedent coreference, the nature of predicates with NNSs, whether they are volitional or non-volitional, possibilities of control coreference and agreement phenomena. These analyses have significant implications for theories of syntax and verbal semantics, first language acquisition of NNSs, convergence of case marking patterns in language contact situations, and the nature of syntactic change.
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Volume 60 in this series
Volume 1 of Non-nominative Subjects (NNSs) presents the most recent research on this topic from a wide range of languages from diverse language families of the world, with ample data and in-depth analysis. A significant feature of these volumes is that authors with different theoretical perspectives study the intricate questions raised by these constructions. Some of the central issues include the subject properties of noun phrases with ergative, dative, accusative and genitive case, case assignment and checking, anaphor–antecedent coreference, the nature of predicates with NNSs, whether they are volitional or non-volitional, possibilities of control coreference and agreement phenomena. These analyses have significant implications for theories of syntax and verbal semantics, first language acquisition of NNSs, convergence of case marking patterns in language contact situations, and the nature of syntactic change.
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Volume 59 in this series
The basic idea behind this volume is to probe the nature of grammaticalization. Its contributions focus on the following questions: (i) In how far can grammaticalization be considered a universal diachronic process or mechanism of change and in how far is it conditioned by synchronic factors? (ii) What is the role of the speaker in grammaticalization? (iii) Does grammaticalization itself provide a cause for change or is it an epiphenomenon, i.e. a conglomeration of causal factors/mechanisms which elsewhere occur independently? (iv) If it is epiphenominal, how do we explain that similar pathways so often occur in known cases of grammaticalization? (v) Is grammaticalization unidirectional? (vi) What is the nature of the parameters guiding grammaticalization? The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization does or does not entail via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions.
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This is the first book on coordinating constructions that adopts a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Coordination has been studied intensively in English and other major European languages, but we are only beginning to understand the range of variation that is found world-wide. This volume consists of a number of general studies, as well as fourteen case studies of coordinating constructions in languages or groups of languages: Africa (Iraqw, Fongbe, Hausa), the Caucasus (Daghestanian, Tsakhur, Chechen), the Middle East (Persian and other Western Iranian languages), Southeast Asia (Lai, Karen, Indonesian), the Pacific (Lavukaleve, Oceanic, Nêlêmwa), and the Americas (Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan). A detailed introductory chapter summarizes the main results of the volume and situates them in the context of other relevant current research.
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Volume 57 in this series
Dependent-Head Synthesis in Nivkh has been awarded a prize of the Offermann-Hergarten Donation at the University of Cologne in 2004. The endowments are granted for outstanding innovative and comprehensibly documented research.This book offers an innovative approach to three interlaced topics: A systematic analysis of the morphosyntatic organization of Nivkh (Paleosiberian); a cross-linguistic investigation of complex noun forms (parallel to complex (polysynthetic) verb forms); and a typology of polysynthesis. Nivkh (Gilyak) is linguistically remarkable because of its highly complex word forms, both verbs and nouns. They are formed productively from ad hoc concatenation of lexical roots in dependent — head relations without further morphological marking: primary object — predicate, attribute - noun, noun — relational morpheme ("adposition"). After an in-depth examination of the wordhood of such complexes the morphological type of Nivkh is explored against the background of polysynthesis, noun incorporation, verb root serialization, noun complexes and head/dependent marking. For this purpose, a new delimitation and classification of polysynthesis is proposed on the basis of an evaluation of 75 languages. Besides contributing to a reconciliation of previous diametrically opposed approaches to polysynthesis, this study challenges some common preconceived notions with respect to how languages "should be".
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This book contributes to an area of study that is of interest to linguists of all backgrounds. Typological in nature this volume presents data analysis from the major language families of Africa as well as Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Japanese, Indo-European, Siouan and Penutian. The 16 contributors to the volume share a commitment to examining the language phenomena pertaining to the volume’s theme with a fresh eye. While most of the papers make reference to existing theoretical frameworks, each also makes a novel and sometimes surprising contribution to the body of knowledge and theory concerning motional, directional and locational predicates, complements, morphology, adpositions and other phenomena. This collection of articles suitably complements courses on comparative and diachronic linguistics, semantics, syntax, typology, or field methods.
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Volume 55 in this series
This book proposes a framework for describing languages through the description of relationships among lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology. The framework is based on the notion of formal coding means; the principle of functional transparency; the notion of functional domains; and the notion of systems interaction in the coding of functional domains. The study is based on original analyses of cross-linguistic data.The fundamental finding of the study is that different languages may code different functional domains, which must be discovered by analyzing the formal means available in each language. The first part of the book proposes a methodology for discovering functional domains and the second part describes the properties of various functional domains.
The book presents new cross-linguistic analyses of theoretical issues including agreement; phenomena attributed to government; nominal classification; prerequisites for and implications of linear order coding; and defining characteristics of lexical categories.
The study also contributes new analyses of specific problems in individual languages.
The book presents new cross-linguistic analyses of theoretical issues including agreement; phenomena attributed to government; nominal classification; prerequisites for and implications of linear order coding; and defining characteristics of lexical categories.
The study also contributes new analyses of specific problems in individual languages.
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Volume 54 in this series
In a number of languages, the speaker must specify the evidence for every statement whether seen, or heard, or inferred from indirect evidence, or learnt from someone else. This grammatical category, referring to information source, is called ‘evidentiality’. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and non-reported), while others have six (or even more) terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subtype of epistemic or some other modality, or of tense-aspect. The introductory chapter sets out cross-linguistic parameters for studying evidentiality. It is followed by twelve chapters which deal with typologically different languages from various parts of the world: Shipibo-Conibo, Jarawara, Tariana and Myky from South America; West Greenlandic Eskimo; Western Apache and Eastern Pomo from North America; Qiang (Tibeto-Burman); Yukaghir (Siberian isolate); Turkic languages; languages of the Balkans; and Abkhaz (Northwest Caucasian). The final chapter summarises some of the recurrent patterns.
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Volume 53 in this series
The contributors to this volume are linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and anthropologists who share the assumption that language, just as mind and brain, are products of biological evolution. The rise of human language is not viewed as a serendipitous mutation that gave birth to a unique linguistic organ, but as a gradual, adaptive extension of pre-existing mental capacities and brain structures. The contributors carefully study brain mechanisms, diachronic change, language acquisition, and the parallels between cognitive and linguistic structures to weave a web of hypotheses and suggestive empirical findings on the origins of language and the connections of language to other human capacities. The chapters discuss brain pathways that support linguistic processing; origins of specific linguistic features in temporal and hierarchical structures of the mind; the possible co-evolution of language and the reasoning about mental states; and the aspects of language learning that may serve as models of evolutionary change.
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Volume 52 in this series
The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions.
Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language.
Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments.
The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.
Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language.
Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments.
The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.
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Volume 51 in this series
This volume explores properties of ‘sit’, ‘stand’, and ‘lie’ verbs, reflecting three of the most salient postures associated with humans. An introductory chapter by the Editor provides an overview of directions for research into posture verbs. These directions are then explored in detail in a number of languages: Dutch; Korean; Japanese; Lao; Chantyal, Magar (Tibeto-Burman); Chipewyan (Athapaskan); Trumai (spoken in Brazil); Kxoe (Khoisan); Mbay (Nilo-Saharan); Oceanic; Enga, Ku Waru (Papuan); Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Ngan’gityemerri (Australian). The contributors discuss data relevant to many fields of linguistic inquiry, including patterns of lexicalization (e.g., simplex or complex verb forms), morphology (e.g., state vs. action formations), grammaticalization (e.g., extension to locational predicates, aspect markers, auxiliaries, copulas, classifiers), and figurative extension. A final chapter reports on an experimental methodology designed to establish the relevant cognitive parameters underlying speakers’ judgements on the polysemy of English stand. Taken together, the chapters provide a wealth of cross-linguistic data on posture verbs.
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Volume 50 in this series
The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.
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Volume 49 in this series
The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.
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Volume 48 in this series
This volume presents fifteen original papers dealing with various aspects of causative constructions ranging from morphology to semantics with emphasis on language data from Central and South America. Informed by a better understanding of how different constructions are positioned both synchronically (e.g., on a semantic map) and diachronically (e.g., through grammaticalization processes), the volume affords a comprehensive up-to-date perspective on the perennial issues in the grammar of causation such as the distribution of competing causative morphemes, the meaning distinctions among them, and the overall form-meaning correlation. Morphosyntactic interactions of causatives with other phenomena such as incorporation and applicativization receive focused attention as such basic issues as the semantic distinction between direct and indirect causation and the typology of causative constructions.
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Volume 47 in this series
Few linguistic concepts are more elusive than ‘possession’. The present collection of articles, selected from an international workshop held in Copenhagen in May 1998, confronts the subject from several angles (lexicon; the semantics of possession and the verb HAVE; the syntax of genitives and other possessive structures; the interaction of verbal and nominal constructions; the semantic and textual implications of the alienable/inalienable distinction, etc.) and approaches (formal semantics; functional semantics; and syntax as diachronic and typological comparisons). The languages covered include both European languages such as Danish, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin, and several American, Australian, African and Asian languages. This volume in which the contributing scholars have sought to examine as many 'dimensions' as possible is of interest to all linguists, in particular those working in the field of typology and functional approaches to language.
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Volume 46 in this series
In some languages every subject is marked in the same way, and also every object. But there are languages in which a small set of verbs mark their subjects or their objects in an unusual way. For example, most verbs may mark their subject with nominative case, but one small set of verbs may have dative subjects, and another small set may have locative subjects. Verbs with noncanonically marked subjects and objects typically refer to physiological states or events, inner feelings, perception and cognition. The Introduction sets out the theoretical parameters and defines the properties in terms of which subjects and objects can be analysed. Following chapters discuss Icelandic, Bengali, Quechua, Finnish, Japanese, Amele (a Papuan language), and Tariana (an Amazonian language); there is also a general discussion of European languages. This is a pioneering study providing new and fascinating data, and dealing with a topic of prime theoretical importance to linguists of many persuasions.
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A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people’s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.
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Volume 44 in this series
The present volume represents a selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Ideophones held in January 1999 in St. Augustin, Germany. They center around the following hypotheses: Ideophones are universal; and constitute a grammatical category in all languages of the world; ideophones and similar words have a special dramaturgic function that differs from all other word classes: they simulate an event, an emotion, a perception through language. In addition to this unique function, a good number of formal parallels can be observed. The languages dealt with here display strikingly similar patterns of derivational processes involving ideophones. An equally widespread common feature is the introduction of ideophones via a verbum dicendi or complementizer. Another observation concerns the sound-symbolic behavior of ideophones. Thus the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound-symbolism. Finally it is made clear that ideophones are part of spoken language — the language register, where gestures are used — rather than written language.
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Volume 43 in this series
Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory both belong to the broader category of historical linguistics, yet few linguists practice both. The methods and goals of each group seem largely distinct: comparative linguists have by and large avoided reconstructing grammar, while grammaticalization theoreticians have either focused on explaining attested historical change or used internal reconstruction to formulate hypotheses about processes of change. In this collection, some of the leading voices in grammaticalization theory apply their methods to comparative data (largely drawn from indigenous languages of the Americas), showing not only that grammar can be reconstructed, but that the process of reconstructing grammar can yield interesting theoretical and typological insights.
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Volume 42 in this series
All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.
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Volume 41 in this series
The theoretical issues addressed in the present volume are semantic and cognitive properties of reciprocal events, syntactic properties of reciprocals, and the relationship of reciprocals to other grammatical categories. Several papers discuss the history of reciprocal constructions, offering alternative hypotheses regarding the grammaticalization of reciprocals. The formal, functional, typological and historical approaches in the present volume complement each other, contributing together to the understanding of forms, and syntactic and semantic properties of reciprocal markers. Several papers in the present volume make a double contribution to the problems of reciprocal constructions: they provide new descriptive data and they address theoretical issues at the same time.
The languages discussed include: English, Dutch, German, Greek, Polish, Nyulnyulan (Australia), Amharic
(Ethio-Semitic), Bilin (Cushitic), Chadic languages, Bantu, Halkomelem (Salishan), Mandarin, Yukaghir and a number of Oceanic languages. The volume also includes a study of grammaticalization of reciprocals and
reflexives in African languages.
The languages discussed include: English, Dutch, German, Greek, Polish, Nyulnyulan (Australia), Amharic
(Ethio-Semitic), Bilin (Cushitic), Chadic languages, Bantu, Halkomelem (Salishan), Mandarin, Yukaghir and a number of Oceanic languages. The volume also includes a study of grammaticalization of reciprocals and
reflexives in African languages.
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Volume 40 in this series
The importance of reflexive markers in the study of language structure cannot be underestimated: they participate in the coding of the argument structure of a clause; in the coding of semantic relations between arguments and verbs; in the coding of the relationship between arguments; in the coding of aspect; in the coding of point of view; and in the Coding of the information structure of a clause.
The present volume offers an approach to reflexive forms and functions from several perspectives: a formal approach where reflexives are discussed within a well-defined model of language representation; a typological approach; a historical approach concentrating on grammaticalization of reflexives and on the changes that pronouns and anaphors undergo; and a functionalist approach where functions of reflexive forms are described. The languages from which data were drawn represent a wide variety of language families and language types: English, Old English, Dutch, German, Tsakhur (Nakh-Dagestanian), Spanish, French, Bantu and Chadic languages. The variety of languages discussed and the different approaches taken complement each other in that each contributes an important piece to the understanding of reflexives in a cross-linguistic perspective.
The present volume offers an approach to reflexive forms and functions from several perspectives: a formal approach where reflexives are discussed within a well-defined model of language representation; a typological approach; a historical approach concentrating on grammaticalization of reflexives and on the changes that pronouns and anaphors undergo; and a functionalist approach where functions of reflexive forms are described. The languages from which data were drawn represent a wide variety of language families and language types: English, Old English, Dutch, German, Tsakhur (Nakh-Dagestanian), Spanish, French, Bantu and Chadic languages. The variety of languages discussed and the different approaches taken complement each other in that each contributes an important piece to the understanding of reflexives in a cross-linguistic perspective.
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Volume 39 in this series
External Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as “have” or “own”. In many cases, EPCs appear to “break the rules” about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.
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The present volume is a collection of fifteen original articles that include descriptive, typological and/or theoretical studies of a number of morphosyntactic phenomena, such as case, transitivity, grammaticalization, valency alternations, etc., in a variety of languages or language groups, and discussions concerning theoretical issues in specific grammatical frameworks. The collection, written in honor of the Australian linguist Barry J. Blake on his 60th birthday, thematically reflects the field that Professor Blake has worked in over the past three decades. The volume will be of special interest to researchers in morphosyntax, and linguistic typology. In addition, scholars in discourse grammar, historical linguistics, theoretical syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and language contact will find articles of interest in the book.
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Volume 37 in this series
The earliest use of the term “grammaticalization” was to refer to the process whereby lexical words of a language (such as English keep in “he keeps bees”) become grammatical forms (such as the auxiliary in “he keeps looking at me”). Changes of this kind, which involve semantic fading and a downshift from a major to a minor category, have generally been agreed to come under the heading of grammaticalization. But other changes that equally contribute to new grammatical forms do not involve this kind of fading. In recent years, a debate has arisen over how to constrain the term theoretically. Is grammaticalization to be distinguished from “lexicalization”, the creation and fixing of new words out of older patterns of compounding? If so, how is the line to be drawn between a form that is grammatical and one that is lexical? Should the term “grammaticalization” be extended to the study of the origins of grammatical constructions in general? If so, it will have to include broader issues such as word order change and the reanalysis of phrases. What principles govern these processes? Is grammaticalization a unidirectional event, or can change occur in the reverse direction? The authors of the papers in this volume approach these important questions from a variety of data types, including historical texts, creoles, and a typologically broad sample of modern and ancient languages.
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Volume 36 in this series
In this collection of papers twelve linguists explore a range of interesting properties of ‘give’ verbs. The volume offers an in-depth look at many morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of ‘give’ verbs, including both literal and figurative senses, across languages. Topics include: an apparent zero-morpheme realisation of ‘give’ in a Papuan language; noun plus causative-like suffix expressing the ‘give’ concept in Nahuatl; ‘give’ and other ditransitive constructions in Zulu; the complex verbal morphologies associated with ‘give’ verbs in Chipewyan, Cora, and Sochiapan Chinantec; the elaborate classificatory system found with ‘give’ verbs in Chipewyan and Cora; ‘give’, ‘have’ and ‘take’ constructions in Slavic languages; the expression of ‘give’ in American Sign Language; the origin of the German es gibt construction; the extension of ‘give’ to an adverbial marker in Thai, Khmer, and Vietnamese; the syntax and semantics of Dutch ‘give’; first language acquisition of possession terms.
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Volume 35 in this series
This volume presents a functional perspective on grammatical relations (GRs) without neglecting their structural correlates. Ever since the 1970s, the discussion of RGs by functionally-oriented linguists has focused primarily on their functional aspects, such as reference, cognitive accessibility and discourse topicality. With some exceptions, functionalists have thus ceded the discussion of the structural correlates of GRs to various formal schools.
Ever since Edward Keenan’s pioneering work on subject properties (1975, 1976), it has been apparent that subjecthood and objecthood can only be described properly by a basket of neither necessary nor sufficient properties — thus within a framework akin to Rosch’s theory of Prototype. Some GR properties are functional (reference, topicality, accessibility); others involve overt coding (word-order, case marking, verb agreement). Others yet are more abstract, involving control of grammatical processes (rule-governed behavior).
Building on Keenan’s pioneering work, this volume concentrates on the structural aspects of GRs within a functionalist framework. Following a theoretical introduction, the papers in the volume deal primarily with recalcitrant typological issues: The dissociation between overt coding properties of GRs and their behavior-and-control properties; GRs in serial verb constructions; GRs in ergative languages; The impact of clause union and grammaticalization on GRs.
Ever since Edward Keenan’s pioneering work on subject properties (1975, 1976), it has been apparent that subjecthood and objecthood can only be described properly by a basket of neither necessary nor sufficient properties — thus within a framework akin to Rosch’s theory of Prototype. Some GR properties are functional (reference, topicality, accessibility); others involve overt coding (word-order, case marking, verb agreement). Others yet are more abstract, involving control of grammatical processes (rule-governed behavior).
Building on Keenan’s pioneering work, this volume concentrates on the structural aspects of GRs within a functionalist framework. Following a theoretical introduction, the papers in the volume deal primarily with recalcitrant typological issues: The dissociation between overt coding properties of GRs and their behavior-and-control properties; GRs in serial verb constructions; GRs in ergative languages; The impact of clause union and grammaticalization on GRs.
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Volume 34 in this series
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Conversation, held at the University of New Mexico in July 1995. The symposium brought together scholars who work on face-to-face communication from a variety of perspectives: social, cultural, cognitive and communicative. Our aim for both the symposium and this volume has been to challenge some of the prevailing dichotomies in discourse studies: First, the cleavage between the study of information flow and the study of social interaction. Second, the theoretical division between speech-situation models and cognitive models. Third, the methodological split between the study of spontaneous conversation in natural context and the study of speech production and comprehension under controlled experimental conditions. And fourth, the rigid genre distinction between narrative and conversational discourse.
All four dichotomies have been useful either methodologically or historically. But important as they may have been in the past, the time has perhaps come to work toward an integrated approach to the study of human communication, one that will be less dependent on narrow reductions.
Both the ontological primacy and the methodological challenge of natural face-to-face communication are self evident. Human language has evolved, is acquired, and is practiced most commonly in the context of face-to-face communication. Most past theory-building in either linguistics or psychology has not benefited from the study of face-to-face communication, a fact that is regrettable and demands rectification. We hope that this volume tilts in the right direction.
All four dichotomies have been useful either methodologically or historically. But important as they may have been in the past, the time has perhaps come to work toward an integrated approach to the study of human communication, one that will be less dependent on narrow reductions.
Both the ontological primacy and the methodological challenge of natural face-to-face communication are self evident. Human language has evolved, is acquired, and is practiced most commonly in the context of face-to-face communication. Most past theory-building in either linguistics or psychology has not benefited from the study of face-to-face communication, a fact that is regrettable and demands rectification. We hope that this volume tilts in the right direction.
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Volume 33 in this series
The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the “next generation” of studies in anaphora — defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference — taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.
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Volume 32 in this series
This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical orientations — all within the broad domain of functional linguistics — they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of grammar.
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Volume 31 in this series
The main theme running through this volume is that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a property of the spoken or written text, or of the social situation. Coherence emerges during speech production-and-comprehension, allowing the speech receiver to form roughly the same episodic representation as the speech producer had in mind. In producing and comprehending a text, be it spoken or written, the interlocutors collaborate towards coherence. They negotiate for a common ground of shared topicality, reference and thematic structure – thus toward a similar mental representation of the text. In conversation, the negotiation takes place between the present participants. In writing or oral narrative, the negotiation takes place in the mind of the text producer, between the text producer and his/her mental representation of the mind of the absent or inactive interlocutor. The cognitive mechanisms that underlie face-to-face communication thus continue to shape text production and comprehension in non-interactive contexts.Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1992.
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Volume 30 in this series
This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.
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Volume 29 in this series
This collection of articles offers descriptions of the negation system in 16 languages. As not much is known about negation systems in non-European languages, the first aim of the volume is to provide data on various aspects on negation; for all articles these data were collected on the basis of the same questionnaire. Most work on this subject deals with syntactic aspects of negation; this volume attempts to include pragmatic and semantic issues as well, such as the expression of negative indefinites, interaction of negation and quantifiers, the scope of negation, and the choice of a particular form of negation in cases where there are several ways to express this. For a number of less-known languages descriptions offering a wealth of data are presented here, and in the articles about well-studied languages, new data and analyses of more complicated issues are provided.
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Volume 28 in this series
This collection aims first to establish a structure-independent, language-independent definition of pragmatic voice, and more specifically then a universal functional definition of “inverse”. The grammar and pragmatic function of the four major voice constructions — direct-active, inverse, passive, antipassive — are surveyed using narrative texts from 14 languages: Koyukon (Athabascan), Plains Cree (Algonquian), Chepang (Tibeto-Burman), Squamish and Bella Coola (Salish), Sahaptin (Sahaptian), Kutenai (isolate), Surinam Carib (Carib), Spanish and Greek (Indo-European), Korean, Maasai (Nilotic), Cebuano and Karao (Philippine). The comparative quantified study of pragmatic voice functions tests the validity of a universal functional definition of voice and in particular of “inverse”. The cross-language comparison of grammatical structures that code the various voice functions then lays down the foundation for a non-trivial cross-language typology of “inverse”.
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Volume 27 in this series
The volume's central concern is grammatical voice, traditionally known as diathesis, and its classical manifestations as Active, Middle, and Passive. While numerous problems in the meaning, syntax, and morphology of these categories in Indo-European remain unsolved, their counterparts in more exotic languages have raised still further questions. What discourse functions and diachronic events unite 'voice' as a recognizable phenomenon across languages? How are they typically grammaticalized? What stages do children go through in learning them? How does 'voice' link up with ergativity and with other categories and constructions such as the Inverse and the Antipassive? The authors in this volume have different perspectives on these problems: they discuss voice, e.g., from a typological-universal view, in relation to language acquisition and to ergativity, and from diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives.
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Volume 26 in this series
This work examines both historical and comparative evidence in documenting the sweep of diachronic change in the context of serial verb constructions. Using a wide range of data from languages of West Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, it demonstrates how shifts in meaning and usage result in syntactic, morphological and lexical change. The process by which verbs lose lexical semantic content and develop case-marking functions is described; it is argued that the change is directional, from verb to preposition (or postposition) to affix, along a grammaticalization continuum. This same grammaticalization process is shown to result in the development of complementizers, adverbial subordinators, conjunctions, adverbs and auxiliaries from verbs. Strong parallels across languages are found in the meanings of the verbs that become “defective” and in the functions they come to mark. The changes are documented in detail, with examples from a number of languages illustrating the effect of the changes on typology and word order, implications for the encoding of definiteness and aspect, and the relevance of notions such as discourse topic, foreground and transitivity. With respect to theoretical assumptions and terminology, the author has taken a relatively nonpartisan approach, and the discussion is accessible to students of language as well as of interest to theoreticians.
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Volume 25 in this series
A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphemes expressing spatial relationships that discusses the relationship between the way human beings experience space and the way it is encoded grammatically in language. The discussion of the similarities and differences among languages in the encoding and expression of spatial relations centers around the emergence and evolution of spatial grams, and the semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics of two types of spatial grams. The author bases her observations on the study of data from 26 genetically unrelated and randomly selected languages. It is shown that languages are similar in the way spatial grams emerge and evolve, and also in the way specific types of spatial grams are used to express not only spatial but also temporal and other non-spatial relations. Motivation for these similarities may lie in the way we, as human beings, experience the world, which is constrained by our physical configuration and neurophysiological apparatus, as well as our individual cultures.
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Volume 24 in this series
Many linguists have believed that there is no connection between culture and language structures. This study reviews some of the literature supporting vocabulary connections, hypotheses for other connections, and critical views of this type of hypothesis. Precisely such a connection is developed employing a functional view of language and grammaticization principles. Using a world-wide probability sample of forty-nine languages, an association between culture and the grammatical coding of deictics is tested and statistically found to be corroborated to a very significant extent. Suggestions are included on how some of the concepts used and developed in this study might be extended.
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Volume 23 in this series
This book approaches the middle voice from the perspective of typology and language universals research. The principal aim is to provide a typologically valid characterization of the category of middle voice in terms of which it can be incorporated in a cognitively-based theory of human language. The term “middle voice” has had a wide range of applications in the linguistic literature of this century. The main thesis in this volume is that there is a coherent, though complex, semantic category of middle voice in human language, which receives grammatical instantiation in many languages. The author claims there is a semantic property crucial to the nature of the middle, which she terms “relative elaboration of events”, that serves as a parameter along which the reflexive and the middle can be situated as semantic categories intermediate in transitivity between one-participant and two-participant events, and which differentiates reflexive and middle from one another. In this area, most analyses deal with one language and/or are limited to Indo-European languages. This work deals with a subset of middle-marking languages that was chosen so as to observe the highest possible number of different middle systems showing significant independent diachronic development.
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Volume 22 in this series
For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a “basic” order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the “basic” order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of “basic”, with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.
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Volume 21 in this series
This volume grew out of the Seventeenth Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium, which was held in Milwaukee on April 8-10, 1988. The theme of the conference was the relationship between linguistics and literacy. In this volume, a selection of papers are presented which cluster around three of the major themes that developed during the conference: the linguistic differences between written and spoken genres, the relationship between orthographic systems and phonology, and the psychology of orthography. The volume concludes with a solicited paper by Walter J. Ong which draws together the various strands considered in the other sections of the book and addresses the broader question of the social and psychological consequences of literacy.
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Volume 20 in this series
Joseph H. Greenberg is a towering figure in late twentieth century linguistics. His major contributions in the field have been in the area of typology and universals, virtually launched by his paper on word order universals, and in diachronic linguistics. The major thrust of Greenberg's work in the past three decades has been in the fusion of these two approaches to linguistic explanation into one, diachronic typology, the cross-linguistic analysis of languages as dynamic systems.This volume honors Greenberg on the occasion of his 75th birthday. It opens with an introduction discussing Greenberg's work at length and a full bibliography of his publications. It contains ten papers in typology, diachronic theory and diachronic typology by some of the leading linguists working in the research tradition inspired by Greenberg's work.
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Volume 18 in this series
Traditionally the study of syntax is restricted to the study of what goes on within the boundaries of the prosodic sentence. Although the nature of clause combining within a prosodic sentence has always been a central concern of traditional syntax (in GG, e.g. it underlies important research on deletion and anaphora), work within a discourse analysis framework has hardly been done. Analyses like this are given in the present volume.
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Volume 17 in this series
The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals, results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations, and discussions concerning the explanation of universals. The volume will be of great interest to researchers in syntax and in language universals. In addition, scholars in pragmatics, philosophy of linguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics and semantics will also find articles of interest in the book.
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Volume 16 in this series
This volume brings together 18 original papers dealing with voice-related phenomena.The languages dealt with represent both typological and geographic diversity, ranging from accusative-type languages to ergative-type and Philippine-type languages, and from Australia to Africa and Siberia. The studies presented here open up many possibilities for theorizing and offer data inviting formal treatments, but the most important contribution they make is in terms of the insights they offer for a better understanding of the fundamentals of voice phenomena.
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Volume 15 in this series
Over the past fifteen years, descriptions of Australian Aboriginal languages have provided important data for the typological study of morpho-syntactic phenomena. The present volume presents descriptions of complex sentence phenomena in ten Australian languages and provides important new material in this area of current concern in linguistics. Complex sentences are described either from a syntactic or from a semantic (discourse-functional) point of view. The papers draw on data from widely distributed and, in some instances, previously undescribed languages. Among others descriptions of the (so-far) poorly known non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia, as well as Pama-Nyungan languages central and northern Australia are included in this volume.
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Volume 14 in this series
Within the field of Japanese linguistics, few areas have generated as much controversy as the morpheme wa; traditionally described as a marker of old or contrasted information, its function as a discourse marker has also been studied. This work aims to deepen the understanding of wa through careful examination of the particle at both sentence and discourse levels in old Japanese as well as present-day Japanese. Previous studies have concentrated on syntactic analyses of wa. The contributors to this volume challenge the old approach and uncover new properties of wa. The four topics discussed are: wa in Narrative and Expository Discourse; wa and other Syntactic Phenomena; Historical Perspectives on wa and Pragmatic Perspectives on wa.
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Volume 12 in this series
This volume, originally published in Russian, combines data from a wide range of languages, meticulously analyzed, with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus capable of isolating the most important syntactic and semantic parameters and of drawing those generalizations that are most significant from a cross-linguistic perspective. Many ideas which are at best only hinted at in earlier literature – such as the precise relation among resultative, perfect, and stative, or correlations between resultative and passive voice – are here for the first time stated precisely and given a firm foundation by means of detailed exemplification from a wide range of languages.
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Volume 11 in this series
This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.
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Volume 10 in this series
This book presents a stage in the evolution of a theory of modality meanings and forms. It covers exclusively complements. There are two questions that this book addresses. Can one find a small, finite set of meanings which systematically underlies the enormous variety of meanings found in complements? And can one make any predictions from this set of meanings about the variety of forms they take? The answer to both questions is yes. The author convincingly shows how a multiplicity of sentence meanings and forms can be accounted for by breaking down sentence meaning into a small set of modules and howing how these modules combine to express certain meanings and how complement forms are related to them and their combinations.
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Volume 9 in this series
This is a textbook right in the thick of current interest in morphology. It proposes principles to predict properties previously considered arbitrary and brings together the psychological and the diachronic to explain the recurrent properties of morphological systems in terms of the processes that create them. For the student, the clear discussion of morphology and morphophonemics and the rich variety of data brought in on the way to the theoretical conclusion is material for a direct learning experience.
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Volume 8 in this series
Turkish is a member of the Turkic family of languages, which extends over a vast area in southern and eastern Siberia and adjacent portions of Iran, Afganistan, and China. Turkic, in turn, belongs to the Altaic family of languages. This book deals with the morphological and syntactic, semantic and discourse-based, synchronic and diachronic aspects of the Turkish language. Although an interest in morphosyntactic issues pervades the entire collection, the contributions can be grouped in terms of relative attention to syntax, semantics and discourse, and acquisition.
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Volume 7 in this series
This volume is about the nature of categories in cognition and the relevance of these in language description, especially classifier systems. The classical view of categories was that they were discrete and based upon clusters of properties which were inherent to the entities. In recent years this conception has been challenged in different fields. By now prototype theory has established itself as one of the main approaches in linguistics. This volume brings classifier systems to the attention of cognitive psychologists dealing with the phenomenon of human categorization. For the general linguist it shows what can be learned from classifier systems into any theory on the nature of language organization, it will challenge some of the most entrenched notions in the field of linguistics, notions of what language is made of and how it functions.
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Volume 6 in this series
The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way. The papers in Part I of this volume deal with aspects of motivation, the ways in which the linguistic form is a diagram of conceptual structure, and homologous with it in interesting ways. Most of the papers in Part II focus on isomorphism, the tendency to associate a single invariant meaning with each single invariant form. The papers in Part III deal with the apparent arbitrariness that arises from competing motivations.
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Volume 5 in this series
This volume consists of papers presented at the Conference on Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition, University of Southern California, February 1982. Published with the papers are the remarks of the originally assigned discussants. The collection represents an important cross-fertilization between research in grammatical theory and in second language acquisition. Topics dealt with in a number of the papers include word order, markedness, core grammar, accessability hierarchies, and simplified registers. The range of universals discussed embraces phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. Universals are also considered with reference to ontology, psychological reality, and evaluation metrics.
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Volume 4 in this series
This is a comparative study on the subject of interrogativity, presenting broad and narrow attributes on this subject in diverse languages: Russian, Mandarin, Georgian, Bengali, Bantu, Japanese, West Greenlandic and Ute. Each contribution presents, first the basic facts about the language in question, its more recent provenience, facts about numbers of speakers, writing systems, and related areal and sociolinguistic points. An overview of the typological hallmarks follows together with a sketch of the grammar broadly construed. Finally, the grammar of interrogativity is described and the semantics and pragmatics of it are explored.
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Volume 3 in this series
The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.
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Volume 2 in this series
Canonical switch-reference is an inflectional category of the verb, which indicates whether or not its subject is identical with the subject of some other verb. Switch-reference may be analyzed from a structural or a functional point of view. Functionally, switch-reference is a device for referential tracking. Formally, switch-reference is almost always a verbal category, similar to the familiar category of verbal concord. In most languages switch-reference marking is indicated by a verbal affix, however in some languages it may be marked by an independent morpheme. The contributions to this volume are concerned with questions of form, function, and genesis of canonical switch-reference systems.
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Volume 1 in this series
The verbal categories of tense and aspect have been studied traditionally from the point of view of their reference to the timing and time-perspective of the speaker’s reported experience. They are universal categories both in terms of the semantic-functional domain they cover as well as in terms of their syntactic and morphological realization. Nevertheless, their treatment in contemporary linguistics is often restricted and narrow based, often involving mere recapitulatoin of traditional semantic and morphotactic studies.
The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including — in addition to the traditional semantics — also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.
The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including — in addition to the traditional semantics — also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.
