Word Order Typology And Comparative Constructions

This monograph, discussing various aspects involved with a typology of word order, strives to take a next step towards a better understanding of the profound unity underlying languages. The volume is divided into five sections: 1) Word order typology; 2) A critical analysis of word order typology; 3) Word order within comparative constructions; 4) Word order in the comparative construction in the Rigveda; 5) Diachronic aspects of word order withing comparative constructions.

This monograph, discussing various aspects involved with a typology of word order, strives to take a next step towards a better understanding of the profound unity underlying languages. The volume is divided into five sections: 1) Word order typology; 2) A critical analysis of word order typology; 3) Word order within comparative constructions; 4) Word order in the comparative construction in the Rigveda; 5) Diachronic aspects of word order withing comparative constructions.

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.

This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents, arose from the conference on ditransitive constructions held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) in 2007. It opens with the editors' survey article providing an overview of cross-linguistic variation in ditransitive constructions, followed by the questionnaire on ditransitive constructions, compiled by the editors in order to elicit various properties of these patterns. The editors' overview discusses formal properties of ditransitive constructions as well as behavioral (or syntactic) and lexical properties (i.e., the extension of ditransitive constructions across different verb classes). The volume includes 23 contributions describing properties of ditransitive constructions in languages from all over the world, written by leading experts. Care has been taken that the contributions to the volume will be representative of structural, geographic and genealogical diversity in the domain of ditransitive constructions. Thus the present volume provides a unique source of information on typological diversity of ditransitive constructions. It is expected that it will be of central interest to all scholars and advanced students of linguistics, especially to those working in the field of language typology and comparative syntax.

This work studies the word order of the Gospel of Luke and some of its prominent messages with consideration of systemic functional linguistic theories. The first part of the work focuses on the relative positions of four constituents (subject, predicate, complement and circumstantial adjunct) of different types of Lukan clauses (independent, dependent, infinitival, participial and embedded clause). The result gives some unmarked (typical or common) word order patterns and some marked word order patterns of all Lukan clauses. The second part traces the foregrounded messages of the Gospel based on their related marked word order patterns incorporated with functional linguistic phenomena. The result highlights the messages of Jesus' disciples and his parents' failure in understanding him, Pilate's crime of handing over Jesus and Jesus' predictions of his future sufferings and Peter's future failure. JSNTS and Studies in New Testament Greek series

While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades, the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in typologically and genetically distant languages, albeit with a focus on Africa, and from a range of perspectives. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that also shed light on the diachronic development of similative and equative constructions in language contact situations. Sources of similative morphemes and lexically expressed concepts of likeness are examined, and little-known multifunctionality patterns and grammaticalisation targets of similative morphemes – such as purpose clause markers, modality morphemes and markers of glottonyms – are discussed. Based on a sample of 119 languages worldwide, a new typology of equative constructions is proposed. The book should be of interest to typologists, semanticists, specialists of grammaticalization, historical linguistics and syntax.

Word Order Universals is a detailed account of word order universals and their role in theories of historical change. The starting point is the Greenberg data set, which is comprised of a sample of 142 languages for certain limited co-occurrences of basic word orders, and a 30-language sample for more detailed information. In the Language Index, the 142 have been expanded to some 350 languages. Using the original Greenberg samples and the Expanded Sample, an alternative set of descriptive word order statements is provided. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with an introduction to the theory of word order universals, encompassing topics such as word order variation across languages and theories of universal grammar. The reader is then introduced to the work of Joseph Greenberg and Theo Vennemann on word order universals; implicational universals in Greenberg's data and the Expanded Sample; and the predictions made by implicational and distributional universals for word order change. Reformulated universals for historical reconstruction are also discussed, along with some laws of reconstruction derived from synchronic universals. The final chapter is devoted to the Expanded Sample, with particular reference to its quantities as well as its typological and genetic classification. This monograph will be a useful resource for specialists in grammar and linguistics.

This study, first published in 1990, presents a comprehensive description of the comparative constructions of Spanish and French, and shows that the apparently numerous differences in their syntactic realisations can be accounted for by general constraints on the expression of comparison. There is also a discussion of parallel constructions in other Romance languages, showing that these languages display a range of constructions equally compatible with the suggested pattern of possibilities resulting from the general constraints proposed. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.