Bøker i Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]-serien

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 volume investigates the different alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan and shows that the variation of alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan goes beyond the opposition between accusativity and ergativity. The book includes a thorough discussion of the concepts and terminology relating to alignment patterns. The study draws extensively on new language data from Indo-Aryan. It includes discussions of examples taken from Hindi, Sanskrit, Apabhramsa, Asamiya, Bangla, Oriya, the Bihari languages, Nepali, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Siraiki, Poguli, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marwari, Harauti, the Hindi varieties, and Shina. The volume offers a comprehensive overview of various alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan based on a wide range of data. By focusing on lesser known Indo-Aryan languages, the study questions the central position of Hindi-Urdu in the research on ergativity. Each language is treated in its own right, with a focus on language-specific data and analyses, rather than relying on a notional format that starts with pre-established linguistic concepts. In accordance with this methodology, much attention is paid to "e;indirect"e; connections between ergative constructions and other syntactic and semantic patterns in the various languages.

Cross-linguistic studies on relative constructions in European languages are often centred on standard varieties as described in reference grammars. This volume breaks with the tradition in that it investigates relative constructions in non-standard varieties from a multidisciplinary perspective and addresses a crucial question: what does Europe's typological panorama actually look like?

The Sound Structure of Modern Irish contains a comprehensive description of the phonology of Irish. Based on the main forms of the language, it offers an analysis of the segments and the processes in its sound system. Each section begins with a description of the area of phonology which is the subject - such as stress patterns, phonotactics, epenthesis or metathesis - and then proceeds to consider the special aspects of this subject from a theoretical and typological perspective.The book pays particular attention to key processes in the sound system of modern Irish. The two most important of these are palatalisation and initial mutation, phenomena which are central to Irish and the analysis of which has consequences for general phonological theory.The other main emphasis in the book is on a typological comparison of several different languages, all of which show palatalisation and/or initial mutation as part of their systems. The different forms of Celtic, Slavic languages, Romance dialects and languages along with languages such as Finnish, Fula, Nivkh and Southern Paiute are considered to find out how processes which are phonetic in origin (external sandhi) can become functionalised and integrated into the morphosyntactic system of a language.

This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain must be given due recognition in linguistic theory, on a par with domains such as time and number. The relevant domain is coherent, but at the same time complex in that it consists of two subdomains: one which comprises degree-of-certainty meanings, and one which comprises information-source meanings. The book offers three arguments for giving recognition to such a meaning domain. The first argument concerns the clustering of linguistic expressions with epistemic meaning into morphosyntactically delimited systems of elements. The second argument has to do with the variation pertaining to the coding of epistemic meanings, as highlighted in a semantic map of epistemic expressions. The third argument turns upon the scope properties of epistemic meanings and the morphosyntactic reflections of these properties. Finally, the book proposes a unified cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning in terms of which it attempts to account for the properties of the epistemic meaning domain as well as of individual epistemic meanings.

A collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. It covers such geographical regions as the Americas, the Caucasus, Asia, and Near East.

Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.

This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages.

The contributions address several levels of the language system including morphology, syntax and lexicology, and put special emphasis on mechanisms of internal and contact-induced language change spanning different epochs and societal and textual strata.

Literally hundreds of languages world-wide have experienced direct or indirect Hispanisation during the heyday of the Spanish colonial empire. This volume is meant to give the reader a better idea of the range of contact constellations in which Spanish functions as the donor language.

Contains 30 chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. This book includes an introduction, which describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics.

Explores how much of knowledge based on research on spoken languages needs to be refined in the light of the growing field of sign linguistics. This book focuses on topics: linearity and arbitrariness principles and definition of units and levels of analysis, expression of grammatical categories, semantic relations, and cohesion mechanisms.

Presents fourteen contributions to the debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. This volume also presents a number of vistas on language contact which represent developments in the field. It provides readers with insights on various levels of language-contact related studies.

Ready access to knowledge about cross-linguistic variation is of great value to many types of linguistic research. This book describes a number of successful database projects, focusing on cross-linguistic and typological research. It includes a chapter on general problems of using databases to handle language data.

Serial verbs and complex predicates have a long history of research, yet there is comparatively little documentation on Oceanic languages. This volume presents new data for further typological studies. While previous research on serial verbs in Oceanic languages was mostly devoted to "core" serial constructions (with non-contiguous sV(o)sV(o) nuclei), this volume contributes a more detailed investigation of the "nuclear" type of complex predicates involving contiguous sVV(o) nuclei. Complex predicates of the form VV may correspond to two different syntactic structures, either co-ranking or hierarchized (head-modifier). Though the VV pattern does evidence a tendency towards structural compression, often entailing the fusion of the argument structures of two or more nuclei, yet it cannot be reduced to cases of co-lexicalization, compounding or grammaticalization. The data also show the "nuclear" type to be compatible with all types of basic word orders (VSO, VOS, SVO, SOV), with no evidence that this results from any word order change. This challenges the claim that "nuclear" serialization correlates with verb-final order, and "core" serialization with verb-medial order.

The volume brings together the papers read at the international conference on Romance Objects organized by the Linguistics Department of the Roma Tre University. Thus this volume is addressed not only to scholars interested in the Romance languages but also all those who study the object category in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Written by experts in the field of typology and/or second language acquisition, this volume addresses theoretical and empirical issues on structural domains such as relative clauses and possessive constructions as well as pragmatic considerations on information organization in learners productions.

Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. This title presents an extensive data gathering of rara and rarissima.

The book offers the first collection of papers which explicitly deal with the linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages. The scope of the papers ranges from broad overviews on areal and typological issues to in-depth studies of evidential expressions in particular languages.

Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. This title explains the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other.

A collection of papers on modals in the languages of Europe. It provides readers with a wealth of data and addresses the issues of under which circumstances modals are borrowed, from which linguistic materials they typically arise in these languages, and whether and how modals form a system which is separate from other word classes.

This volume deals with the frequently misinterpreted evidential categories - grammaticalized expressions of subjective "experience" - found in the verbal systems of Turkic and Iranian languages, as well as in some of their Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Tungusic, Caucasian and Armenian contact languages.

This text approaches word classes and their categorial manifestations from the perspective of typology and language universals research. The authors discuss word class categorization in general, as well as word classes and word class systems of individual languages.

This volume puts the European tense-aspect systems in a consistent typological and diachronic perspective.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information.

Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research. The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. The distinctive feature of the series is its markedly empirical orientation. All conclusions to be reached are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. General problems are focused on from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of phenomena from little known languages, which shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics. The series is open to contributions from different theoretical persuasions. It thus reflects the methodological pluralism that characterizes the present situation. Care is taken that all volumes be accessible to every linguist and, moreover, to every reader specializing in some domain related to human language. A deeper understanding of human language in general, based on a detailed analysis of typological diversity among individual languages, is fundamental for many sciences, not only for linguists. Therefore, this series has proven to be indispensable in every research library, be it public or private, which has a specialization in language and the language sciences. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.