Bøger i Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT] serien

This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.

Sequences such as English ¿with regard tö have been described by some as complex prepositions (multi-word equivalents of prepositions), while others have said there is no such category. With diachronic corpus-based studies on fifteen different languages, the studies brought together in this volume show the regularities and specificities of such constructions in European languages with different cultural backgrounds and typological features.

This volume is a series of nine (9) contributions to our understanding of relativization strategies in eleven (11) languages of Cameroon spread into the seven (7) sub-branches of the Niger-Congo phylum: Ekoid, Mambiloid, Mamfe, Mbam, Narrow Bantu, Wide Grassfields, Yemne-Kimbi. As a productive strategy in the world's languages, and considering the evidence that the African language are either under-described, poorly described or not described at all, investigations into the forms, structures and functions of relative clauses and relativization start filling the gap of the absence of analytical descriptive works on the topic. The papers dwelt on the construction of relative clauses, their structure and constraints, their morphosyntactic properties, how they are used to give prominence to topics or participants that are thematic in a given discourse, and to mark the boundaries of units of text, and the formal characteristics of restrictive relative clause constructions. The findings generated so far constitute an endless tank for many fields of hyphenated linguistics including general linguistics, cognitive linguist, applied psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics and pragmatics.

This monograph is intended as a reference book on Detachment Constructions (DECs) in the Information Structuring of oral and spoken languages. Focusing on DECs in a textual perspective, the book is an innovative contribution to the knowledge of oral and spoken languages, some of them widespread (Indo-European), others less taught (Finno-Ugric).

Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. This book brings together research on partitives in different languages.

Presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic perspective. This book is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages. It intends to bring together language typology and the Egyptian-Coptic language in an explicit fashion.

This comprehensive study concentrates particularly on the use of a closed set of motion verbs in five of the major dialects, including Mandarin, W, Hakka, Min and Cantonese. The author shows that these dialects form a continuum with some exhibiting more characteristics of a verb-framed language than the others. The phenomenon reflects the various stages of typological transformation and grammaticalization that the dialects have undergone.

The Iranian languages, due to their exceptional time-depth of attestation, constitute one of the very few instances where a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity is actually documented. Yet remarkably, within historical syntax, the Iranian case has received only very superficial coverage. This book provides the first in-depth treatment of alignment change in Iranian, from Old Persian (5 C. BC) to the present. The first part of the book examines the claim that ergativity in Middle Iranian emerged from an Old Iranian agented passive construction. This view is rejected in favour of a theory which links the emergence of ergativity to External Possession. Thus the primary mechanisms involved is not reanalysis, but the extension of a pre-existing construction. The notion of Non-Canonical Subjecthood plays a pivotal role, which in the present account is linked to the semantics of what is termed Indirect Participation. In the second part of the book, a comparative look at contemporary West Iranian is undertaken. It can be shown that throughout the subsequent developments in the morphosyntax, distinct components such as agreement, nominal case marking, or the grammar of cliticisation, in fact developed remarkably independently of one another. It was this de-coupling of sub-systems of the morphosyntax that led to the notorious multiplicity of alignment types in Iranian, a fact that also characterises past-tense alignments in the sister branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan. Along with data from more than 20 Iranian languages, presented in a manner that renders them accessible to the non-specialist, there is extensive discussion of more general topics such as the adequacy of functional accounts of changes in case systems, discourse pressure and the role of animacy, the notion of drift, and the question of alignment in early Indo-European.

A comparative study of complementizer semantics in European languages. It focuses on semantics, but related issues such as the syntax, morphology and diachrony of complementizers, and their omission and combination are also discussed. It also contains contributions from experts of individual languages and language families.

This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of economic principles with the semantic properties of the individual relations expressed. A fine-grained functional systematization of coordination is proposed and described by means of implicational patterns and semantic maps. This work brings together a broad cross-linguistic perspective and a detailed semantic analysis, largely based on new and comparable data collected by means of questionnaires, all accessible in the appendix of the book. It represents the first systematic attempt towards a unified typology of coordination relations.

The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called "e;direct reported speech"e;). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analysis of quotative indexes and related expressions from a text corpus of each sample language, but also includes a wide range of data from the published literature on other African as well as non- African languages. It is the first typological investigation of direct reported discourse of this magnitude in a large group of languages. The book may thus serve as a starting point of similar studies in other geographical areas or even with a global scope, as well as stimulate more detailed investigations of particular languages. The results of the African survey challenge several prevailing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding quotative indexes and reported discourse constructions as a whole, of which two are of particular interest. In the syntactic domain, where reported discourse has mostly been dealt with under so- called sentential complementation, the study supports the minority view that direct reported discourse and also a large portion of indirect reported discourse show hardly any evidence for the claim that the reported clause is a syntactic object complement of some matrix verb. With respect to grammaticalization, the work concludes that speech verbs are, against common belief, not a frequent source of quotatives, complementizers, and other related markers. Far more frequent sources are markers of similarity and manner; generic verbs of equation, inchoativity, and action; and pronominals referring to the quote or the speaker. Another more general conclusion of the study is that especially direct reported discourse can be fruitfully analyzed as part of a larger linguistic domain called "e;mimesis"e;. This comprises expressions which represent a state of affairs by means of enactment/ performance rather than with the help of "e;canonical"e; linguistic signs and includes, besides reported discourse, world-referring bodily gestures, ideophone-like signs, and non-linguistic sound.

This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. Three types of languages are identified according to the morphological treatment of the comitative and its syncretistic association with other concepts. It is shown that the structural behaviour of comitatives is areally biassed and that the languages of Europe tend to diverge from the majority of the world's languages. This has important repercussions for a language-independent definition of the comitative. The supposed conceptual closeness of comitative and instrumental is discussed in some detail and a semantic map of the comitative is put forward. Markedness is the crucial concept for the evaluation of the relation that ties comitatives and instrumentals to each other. In a separate chapter, the diachrony of comitatives is looked into from the perspective of grammaticalisation research. Throughout the book, the argumentation is richly documented by empirical data. The book contains three case-studies of the comitative in Icelandic, Latvian and Maltese - each of which represents one of the three language types identified earlier in the text. For the purpose of comparing the languages of Europe, a chapter is devoted to the analysis of a large parallel literary corpus (covering 64 languages) which reveals that the parameters of genetic affiliation, areal location and typological classification interact in intricate ways when it comes to predicting whether or not two languages of the sample behave similarly as to the use to which they put their comitative morphemes. With a view to determining the degree of similarity between the languages of the European sub-sample, methods of quantitative typology are employed. General linguists with an interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book as an important contribution to their respective fields of interest. We regret that, due to a PDF problem, the figure on page 111 is partly shown in black. Please find the correct table here.

This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation- the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses- is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, i.e. asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc.) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types- symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.

'Markedness' is a central notion in linguistic theory. This book is the firstto provide a comprehensive survey of markedness relationsacross various grammatical categories, in a sample of closely-related speech varieties. It is based on a sample of over 100 dialects of Romani, collected and processed via the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) Database - a comparative grammatical outline in electronic form, constructed by the authors between 2000-2004. Romani dialects provide an exciting sample of language change phenomena: they are oral languages, which have been separated and dispersed from some six centuries, and are strongly shaped by the influence of diverse contact languages. The book takes a typological approach to markedness, viewing it as a hierarchy among values that is conditioned by conceptual and cognitive universals. But it introduces a functional-pragmatic notion of markedness, as a grammaticalised strategy employed in order to priositise information. In what is referred to as'dynamic', such prioritisation is influenced by an interplay of factors: the values within a category and the conceptual notions that they represent, the grammatical structure onto which the category values are mapped, and the kind of strategy that is applied in order to prioritise certain value. Consequently, the book contains a thorough survey of some 20 categories (e.g Person, Number, Gender, and so on) and their formal representation in various grammatical structures across the sample. The various accepted criteria for markedness (e.g. Complexity, Differentiation, Erosion, and so on) are examined systematically in relation to the values of each and every category, for each relevant structure. The outcome is a novel picture of how different markedness criteria may cluster for certain categories, giving a concrete reality to the hitherto rather vague notion of markedness. Borrowing and its relation to markedness is also examined, offering new insights into the motivations behind contact-induced change.

Split intransitivity has received a great deal of attention in theoretical linguistics since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis by David Perlmutter (1978). This book provides an in-depth investigation of split intransitivity as it occurs in Italian. The principal proposal is that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative (syntactic) and active (semantic) alignment. In contrast to approaches which consider the selection of the perfective operator to be the primary diagnostic of unaccusative or unergative syntax, this study identifies two morphosemantic domains in intransitive constructions on the basis of the analysis of a cluster of related phenomena (including agreement, argument suppression, ne -cliticization, past-participle behaviour, the morphosyntax of experiencer predicates and word order, as well as the selection of the perfective operator). Analysing the degree to which semantic, syntactic and discourse factors interact in determining each manifestation of split intransitivity, this work captures successfully the mismatches in the scope of the various diagnostics. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on corpus-based evidence and crossdialectal comparison, this study makes new empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on split intransitivity. The book is accessible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and will make stimulating reading for researchers and scholars in Italian and Romance linguistics, typology and theoretical linguistics.

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

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

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

This book deals with systems of verb classification in Australian Aboriginal languages, with particular focus on languages of the north-west. It proposes a typology of the systems according to their main formal and semantic characteristics. It also makes some proposals concerning the historical origins and grammaticisation of these systems, and suggestions regarding the grammatical relations involved. In addition, an attempt is made to situate the phenomenon of verb classification within the context of related verbal phenomena such as serial verb constructions, nominal incorporation, and complex predicates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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