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This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework.The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchersin language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.
(Publisher-supplied data) Yan Huang is Reader in Linguistics, Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading.
This book presents a typological analysis of applicatives across African, American Indian, and East Asian languages. It also addresses their functions in discourse, the derivation of their semantic and syntactic properties, and how and why they have changed over time.
Representing the broadest study so far conducted on the typology of subordination (clause or sentence dependency), this book is based on an 80 language sample and provides a large amount of data on the coding of several types of complement, adverbial and relative sentence
This pioneering work draws on data from over 400 languages from a wide range of language families to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession. It examines their interdependence with other typologies and explores varieties of related grammaticalization processes.
This text offers a cross-linguistic account of classifiers. Its range of exemplification includes major and minor languages from every continent and several of the examples are from the author's own fieldwork.
This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate. It uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations.
Presents an encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world. This book shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.