Studies In Syntactic Typology

The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals, results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations, and discussions concerning the explanation of universals. The volume will be of great interest to researchers in syntax and in language universals. In addition, scholars in pragmatics, philosophy of linguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics and semantics will also find articles of interest in the book.

Includes references to Aboriginal languages; chapter on Ergativity by B. Comrie annotated separately.

Explores the similarities and differences of about forty South Asian languages from the four different language families.

The three volumes of Language typology and syntactic description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense; aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized u=in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.

This collection of articles offers descriptions of the negation system in 16 languages. As not much is known about negation systems in non-European languages, the first aim of the volume is to provide data on various aspects on negation; for all articles these data were collected on the basis of the same questionnaire. Most work on this subject deals with syntactic aspects of negation; this volume attempts to include pragmatic and semantic issues as well, such as the expression of negative indefinites, interaction of negation and quantifiers, the scope of negation, and the choice of a particular form of negation in cases where there are several ways to express this. For a number of less-known languages descriptions offering a wealth of data are presented here, and in the articles about well-studied languages, new data and analyses of more complicated issues are provided.