Stephen Matthews

Bernard Comrie

Bill Louw

Professor of Linguistics Maria Polinsky

Maria Polinsky

A collection of photos, maps, charts, and boxed features on virtually every page. Ten chapters discuss the language families of each region of the world.

The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World

The Atlas of Languages

Building upon theoretical innovations and extensive empirical findings, this book explains variation in the syntactic behavior of ergative arguments across languages. It offers a new analysis of ergativity by recognizing two distinct types, PP-ergative- and DP-ergative-languages. Each type is characterized by a set of correlated features which result in structural consistency.

Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features

Deconstructing Ergativity

This volume brings together 18 typological studies of causative and related constructions (transitivity, voice, other expressions of cause) by 19 scholars from North America, Western Europe, and Russia. The inspirations for the volume is the pioneering work on causative constructions by the Leningrad Typology Group; several of the contributors have close connections to the charter members of that group, others have appreciated this work from a distance. The volume as a whole is based on the concept of causative constructions as embracing both morphology and syntax, with an important semantic component as well. In addition to general studies concerning the morpho syntactic and semantic typology and the history of causative constructions and relations to other phenomena, the following individual languages are treated in detail: Russian, English, Dutch, Svan, Even, Korean, Yukaghir, Alutor, Aleut, Haruai, Dogon, Athabaskan languages. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in causative constructions and transitivity relations, and to all who are interested in the linguistic expression of causal relations.

Causatives and Transitivity

Presents an introduction to languages and linguistics, including the evolution of over 200 languages, explanations of writing systems, language trees, and maps illustrating various aspects of all the language families.

John C. Moore

Elegant analyses by linguists have been a point of pride since the time of the Neogrammarians. But ever since Chomsky's pioneering work on the goals of linguistic theory, this descriptive emphasis has shifted to focus on explanation. What, the contributors to this volume ask, renders a linguistic account explanatorily adequate? What are the empirical and theoretical trade-offs that come into play when linguists aim for explanation? Renowned scholars weigh in here, offering insightful answers to these questions.

The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory

Norbert Hornstein

Natural languages offer many examples of displacement, i.e. constructions in which a non-local expression is critical for some grammatical end. Two central examples include phenomena such as raising and passive on the one hand, and control on the other. Though each phenomenon is an example of displacement, they have been theoretically distinguished. Movement rules have generated the former and formally very different construal rules, the latter. The "Movement Theory of Control" challenges this differentiation and argues that the operations that generate the two constructions are the same, the differences arising from the positions through which the displaced elements are moved. In the context of the Minimalist Program, reducing the class of basic operations is methodologically prized. This volume is a collection of original papers that argue for this approach to control on theoretical and empirical grounds as well. The papers also develop and constrain the movement theory to account for novel phenomena from a variety of languages."

Movement Theory of Control

The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages. This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.

Maria Polinsky

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