You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book is a functional-typological study of possession splits in European languages. It shows that genetically and structurally diverse languages such as Icelandic, Welsh, and Maltese display possessive systems which are sensitive to semantically based distinctions reminiscent of the alienability correlation. These distinctions are grammatically relevant in many European languages because they require dedicated constructions. What makes these split possessive systems interesting for the linguist is the interaction of semantic criteria with pragmatics and syntax. Neutralisation of distinctions occurs under focus. The same happens if one of the constituents of a possessive construction is syntactically heavy. These effects can be observed in the majority of the 50 sample languages. Possessive splits are strong in those languages which are outside the Standard Average European group. The bulk of the European languages do not behave much differently from those non-European languages for which possession splits are reported. The book reveals interesting new facts about European languages and possession to typologists, universals researchers, and areal linguists.
Founding Editor: Gabriel Altmann The series Quantitative Linguistics publishes books on all aspects of quantitative methods and models in linguistics, text analysis and related research fields. Specifically, the scope of the series covers the whole spectrum of theoretical and empirical research, ultimately striving for an exact mathematical formulation and empirical testing of hypotheses: observation and description of linguistic data, application of methods and models, discussion of methodological and epistemological issues, modelling of language and text phenomena.
In this article, the distribution of rare features among the world's languages is investigated based on the data from the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005). A Rarity Index for a language is defined, resulting in a listing of the world's languages by mean rarity. Further, a Group Rarity Index is defined to be able to measure average rarity of genealogical or areal groups. One of the most exceptional geographical areas turns out to be northwestern Europe. A closer investigation of the characteristics that make this area exceptional concludes this article.
Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on this assumption, the volume presents theoretical and empirical studies that explore the explanatory power of functional-typological linguistics for the investigation of the world's languages.
How are evidential functions distinguished by means other than grammatical paradigms, i.e. by function words and other lexical units? And how inventories of such means can be compared across languages (against an account also of grammatical means used to mark information source)? This book presents an attempt at supplying a comparative survey of such inventories by giving detailed “evidential profiles” for a large part of European languages: Continental Germanic, English, French, Basque, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Modern Greek, and Ibero-Romance languages, such as Catalán, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Each language is treated in a separate chapter, and their profiles are based on a largely unified set of concepts based on function and/or etymological provenance. The profiles are preceded by a chapter which clarifies the theoretical premises and methodological background for the format followed in the profiles. The concluding chapter presents a synthesis of findings from these profiles, including areal biases and the formulation of methodological problems that call for further research.
Japhug is a vulnerable Gyalrongic language, which belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. It is spoken by several thousand speakers in Mbarkham county, Rngaba district, Sichuan province, China. This grammar is the result of nearly 20 years of fieldwork on one variety of Japhug, based on a corpus of narratives and conversations, a large part of which is available from the Pangloss Collection. It covers the whole grammar of the language, and the text examples provide a unique insight into Gyalrong culture. It was written with a general linguistics audience in mind, and should prove useful not only to specialists of Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics and typologists, but also to anthropologists doing research in Gyalrong areas. It is also hoped that some readers will use it to learn Japhug and pursue research on this fascinating language in the future.
The focus of this volume is the interdependence of diachrony and synchrony in the investigation of syntactic structure. A diverse set of modern and ancient languages is investigated from this perspective, including Hittite, the Classical languages, Old Norse, Coptic, Bantu languages, Australian languages and Creoles. A variety of topics are covered, including TAM, diathesis, valency, case marking, cliticization, and grammaticalization. This volume should be of interest tosyntacticians, typologists, and historical linguists with an interest in syntax and morphology.
None