Fred Karlsson

Matti Miestamo

Kaius Sinnemäki

Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume – a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 – is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.

Typology, contact, change

Language Complexity

Offers a cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on a systematic language sample. This book discusses methodological issues, especially sampling, and typologizes standard negation by paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives.

The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective

Standard Negation

Bernhard Wälchli

The sixteen chapters in this volume are written by typologists and typologically oriented field linguists who have completed their Ph.D. theses in the first four years of this millennium. The authors address selected theoretical questions of general linguistic relevance drawing from a wealth of data hitherto unfamiliar to the general linguistic audience. The general aim is to broaden the horizons of typology by revisiting existing typologies with larger language samples, exploring domains not considered in typology before, taking linguistic diversity more seriously, strengthening the connection between typology and areal linguistics, and bridging the gap to other fields, such as historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The papers cover grammatical phenomena from phonology, morphology up to the syntax of complex sentences. The linguistic phenomena scrutinized include the following: foot and stress, tone, infixation, inflection vs. derivation, word formation, polysynthesis, suppletion, person marking, reflexives, alignment, transitivity, tense-aspect-mood systems, negation, interrogation, converb systems, and complex sentences. More general methodological and theoretical issues, such as reconstruction, markedness, semantic maps, templates, and use of parallel corpora, are also addressed. The contributions in this volume draw from many traditional fields of linguistics simultaneously, and show that it is becoming harder and maybe also less desirable to keep them separate, especially when taking a broadly cross-linguistic approach to language. The book is of interest to typologists and field linguists, as well as to any linguists interested in theoretical issues in different subfields of linguistics.

Broadening the Horizons and Redefining the Foundations

New Challenges in Typology

This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation – the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses – is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, i.e. asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc.) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types – symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.

Anne Tamm

Beta Wagner-nagy

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

Negation in Uralic Languages

Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume  a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005  is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.

Matti Miestamo

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