Martin Haspelmath

This introduction to morphology assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics and presents the field of morphology in an accessible way. Emphasis is put on presenting a range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages.

Understanding morphology

Understanding Morphology

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. Its 142 world maps and numerous regional maps are all in full colour. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description. The CD provides an interactive version of the database which allows the user to customize the maps and find and test correlations. The Atlas is an indispensablesource of information for linguists, anthropologists, and geographers. It will be especially valuable for typologists, grammatical theorists, historical linguists, and those interested in a particular region. It sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to bewithout it.

The World Atlas of Language Structures

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

A Grammar of Lezgian

Bernard Comrie

The Library of Babel

David Gil

Matthew S. Dryer

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description of the structural feature in question. The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages. The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to be without it.

Susanne Maria Michaelis

Philippe Maurer

Magnus Huber

The most authoritative guide ever published to the world's pidgin and creole languages. The 3-volume Survey describes their histories and linguistic characteristics. The Atlas of Pidgins and Creoles, published at the same time, shows how 130 linguistic features are distributed among the world's languages.

Volume 1

The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages

The Atlas presents full colour maps of the distribution among the pidgins and creoles of 120 structural linguistic features drawn from their phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicons. The languages include pidgins, creoles, and contact languages based on English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and French and languages from Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Each map is accompanied by a commentary. The project is the successor to the successful World Atlas of Language Structures and draws on the same linguistic, cartographic, and computing knowledge and skills of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The Atlas is published alongside a three-volume Survey of Pidgins and Creoles which describes the histories and linguistic characteristics of 71 languages. The books have been designed, edited, and written by the world's leading experts in the field and represent the most systematic and comprehensive guide ever published to the world's pidgins, creoles and mixed languages. Individually and together the books are a unique resource of outstanding value for linguists of all persuasions throughout the world.

The Atlas and Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages

Ekkehard König

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.

Structure and Meaning of Adverbial Verb Forms - Adverbial Participles, Gerunds

Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Eitan Grossman

Tonio Sebastian Richter

This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages. The book is the first to bring together language typology and the Egyptian-Coptic language in an explicit fashion.

Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective

This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our current insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters on the patterns and limits of variation manifested by analogous structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (e.g. word order, tense and aspect, inflection, color terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The authors of the individual sections and chapters are for the most part internationally known experts on the relevant topics. The vast majority of the articles are written in English, some in French or German. The handbook is not only intended for the expert in the fields of typology and language universals, but for all of those interested in linguistics. It is specifically addressed to all those who specialize in individual languages, providing basic orientation for their analysis and placing each language within the space of what is possible and common in the languages of the world.

Language Typology and Language Universals / Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien / La typologie des langues et les universaux linguistiques. 2. Halbband

Andrej Malchukov

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.

A Comparative Handbook

Studies in Ditransitive Constructions

Andrea Sims

This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Most of the world's languages have indefinite pronouns, that is, expressions such as someone, anything, and nowhere. Martin Haspelmath presents the first comprehensive and encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world, mapping out the range of variation in their functional and formative properties. He shows that cross-linguistic diversity is severely constrained by a set of implicational universals and by a number of unrestricted universals. The author treats his subject matter broadly within the Humboldt-Greenberg tradition of language typology, but also considers the contribution of other theoretical approaches to an understanding of the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns. The book is organized into four logically ordered steps: selection of a part of grammar-- indefinite pronouns--that can be identified across languages by formal and functional criteria; investigation of the properties of indefinite pronouns in a world-wide sample of forty languages; formulation of generalizations that emerge from the data, summarized in the form of an implicational map; and theoretically informed explanations of the generalizations, which go beyond system-internal statements, appealing to cognitive semantics, functional pressures, and universals of language change (especially grammaticalization).

Indefinite Pronouns

Temporal Adverbials in the World's Languages

From Space to Time

Uri Tadmor

This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database (http: //loanwords.info) allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages.

Loanwords in the World's Languages

This is the first book on coordinating constructions that adopts a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Coordination has been studied intensively in English and other major European languages, but we are only beginning to understand the range of variation that is found world-wide. This volume consists of a number of general studies, as well as fourteen case studies of coordinating constructions in languages or groups of languages: Africa (Iraqw, Fongbe, Hausa), the Caucasus (Daghestanian, Tsakhur, Chechen), the Middle East (Persian and other Western Iranian languages), Southeast Asia (Lai, Karen, Indonesian), the Pacific (Lavukaleve, Oceanic, Nêlêmwa), and the Americas (Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan). A detailed introductory chapter summarizes the main results of the volume and situates them in the context of other relevant current research.

Coordinating Constructions

Language Typology and Language Universals / Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien / La typologie des langues et les universaux linguistiques. 1. Halbband

Presents an encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world. This book shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.

Martin Haspelmath

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