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Subordination
This book presents a typology of subordination systems across the world's languages. Traditional definitions of subordination are based on morphosyntactic criteria, such as clausal embedding or non-finiteness. The book shows that these definitions are untenable in a cross-linguistic perspective, and provides a cognitively based definition of subordination. The analysis is based on a representative 80 language sample, and represents the broadest study so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of several types of complement, adverbial, and relative sentence. These sentence types display considerable structural variation across languages. However, this variation turns out to be constrained, and appears crucially related to the functional properties of individual sentence types. This work is the first systematic attempt to establish comprehensive implicational hierarchies describing the coding of complement, adverbial and relative sentences at a single stroke. Concepts from typological theory and cognitive linguistics are integrated to account for these hierarchies.
Adverbial Clauses in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
This study investigates adverbial clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. In line with other recent typological research in the context of complex sentences and clause-linkage, it proceeds from a detailed, multivariate analysis of the morphosyntactic characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny.
Clause Linkage in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the “Third Syntax of the World’s Languages” conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors. All contributions deal with clause combining, focusing on one or both of the following two dimensions of analysis: properties of the clauses involved, types of dependency. The studies are data-driven and have a cross-linguistic or typological orientation. In addition to survey papers the volume contains in-depth studies of particular languages, mostly based on original data collected in recent field work.
Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation
Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.
Morphosyntax
Taking a functional approach, this book provides a thorough overview of Morphosyntax, and sets out a framework for syntactic constructions.
Typology and Universals
A thorough rewriting to reflect advances in typology and universals in the past decade.
The Limits of Grammaticalization
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 ne...
Acquisitional Dynamics of Russian L2 in Italian Learners
When Italians speak Russian, do they think in Italian or Russian? Or does the thinking not happen in either language? This work is an attempt to answer these questions by an experimental piece of research. The speed and success of the acquisition of the syntactic hierarchization and discourse structuring in Italian native speakers learning Russian L2 were measured and matched in order to compare the distances between Italian and Russian on these two levels. It was demonstrated that the way the speaker uses a linguistic system is not a totally free and arbitrary choice, but it follows certain regularities, and constitutes his textual-discourse competence, i.e. the language use is specifically structured, and the native structure of the linguistic use is much more resistant to the acquisition of the second language than the morpho-syntactic component, probably because the former influences the speaker’s thinking.
Rethinking Grammaticalization
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.
Explanation in typology
This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diac...
