Thomas Stolz

Cornelia Stroh

Aina Urdze

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.

A Typological Study with Special Focus on the Languages of Europe

On Comitatives and Related Categories

Martine Vanhove

Hitomi Otsuka

This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raised by David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies, morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowing hierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, because morphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contact with prior massive borrowing of content words and function words. On the other hand, especially in studies of morphological change, contact is often identified as the decisive factor which triggers the disintegration of morphological systems. However, it remains to be seen whether these two standard treatments of morphology in contact situations exhaust the phenomenology of Contact Morphology. The 14 papers of the present volume shed new light on the behavior of morphology under the conditions of language contact. Fresh empirical data from 40 languages world-wide are presented and new theory-based concepts are discussed. Morphologies in Contact is a first in the history of both morphology and language contact studies. It is meant to mark the beginning of an international research program which explores the entire range of aspects connected to morphologies in contact and thus, paves the way for a full-blown Contact Morphology qua linguistic discipline.

Morphologies in Contact

die Grammatik der lettischen Geräuschverben

Ideophone in Europa

Nataliya Levkovych

Julia Nintemann

Maja Robbers

The extant generalizations about the grammar of space rely heavily on the analyses of declarative sentences. There is a need to check whether these generalizations also hold in the domain of interrogation. To this end this book analyzes data from some 450 languages (including non-standard varieties). The focus is on paradigms of spatial interrogatives such as English where, whither and whence and their internal organization. These paradigms are checked for recurrent patterns of morphological mismatches (such as syncretism) and different degrees of complexity (e.g. the number of segments). The data-base consists of a large parallel literary corpus (Le petit prince and translations thereof) which is complemented by further sources of information such as descriptive grammars. The data are analyzed from a synchronic perspective. However, diachronic issues are addressed unsystematically, too. It is shown that the distribution of phenomena which characterize paradigms of spatial interrogatives are subject to areal-linguistic factors. This is the first typological study of spatial interrogatives. It provides new insights for students of the grammar of space, morphological paradigms, and language typology.

Where, Whither, Whence

Spatial Interrogatives in Europe and Beyond

Sonja Kettler

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.

An areal-linguistic study of the alienability correlation and related phenomena in the languages of Europe

Split Possession

This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. Three types of languages are identified according to the morphological treatment of the comitative and its syncretistic association with other concepts. It is shown that the structural behaviour of comitatives is areally biassed and that the languages of Europe tend to diverge from the majority of the world's languages. This has important repercussions for a language-independent definition of the comitative. The supposed conceptual closeness of comitative and instrumental is discussed in some detail and a semantic map of the comitative is put forward. Markedness is the crucial concept for the evaluation of the relation that ties comitatives and instrumentals to each other. In a separate chapter, the diachrony of comitatives is looked into from the perspective of grammaticalisation research. Throughout the book, the argumentation is richly documented by empirical data. The book contains three case-studies of the comitative in Icelandic, Latvian and Maltese - each of which represents one of the three language types identified earlier in the text. For the purpose of comparing the languages of Europe, a chapter is devoted to the analysis of a large parallel literary corpus (covering 64 languages) which reveals that the parameters of genetic affiliation, areal location and typological classification interact in intricate ways when it comes to predicting whether or not two languages of the sample behave similarly as to the use to which they put their comitative morphemes. With a view to determining the degree of similarity between the languages of the European sub-sample, methods of quantitative typology are employed. General linguists with an interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book as an important contribution to their respective fields of interest. We regret that, due to a PDF problem, the figure on page 111 is partly shown in black. Please find the correct table here.

Aina Urdze

About

Books

Join the club