Main description:
The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals, results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations, and discussions concerning the explanation of universals. The volume will be of great interest to researchers in syntax and in language universals. In addition, scholars in pragmatics, philosophy of linguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics and semantics will also find articles of interest in the book.
Table of contents:
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Language typology and linguistic explanation
- I. Agreement
- Agreement and the distribution of anaphora
- Finiteness and opacity
- Conditions for verb-coded coordinations
- II. Word order
- Investigating universals of sentence complexity
- Universals of negative position
- Accentuation typology, word order and theme-rheme structure
- Preverbal focusing and type XXIII languages
- III. Syntactic and pragmatic functions
- Datives and allatives
- A typology of subjects
- Universals of topic-comment structure
- IV. Explaining universals
- The pragmatics of word order
- On the function of marked and unmarked terms
- Incorporation, parallelism, and focus
- On explaining some right-left asymmetries in syntactic and morphological universals
- The covariance of culture and grammar
- Author index
- Subject index
- Language index
The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals, results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations, and discussions concerning the explanation of universals. The volume will be of great interest to researchers in syntax and in language universals. In addition, scholars in pragmatics, philosophy of linguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics and semantics will also find articles of interest in the book.
Table of contents:
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Language typology and linguistic explanation
- I. Agreement
- Agreement and the distribution of anaphora
- Finiteness and opacity
- Conditions for verb-coded coordinations
- II. Word order
- Investigating universals of sentence complexity
- Universals of negative position
- Accentuation typology, word order and theme-rheme structure
- Preverbal focusing and type XXIII languages
- III. Syntactic and pragmatic functions
- Datives and allatives
- A typology of subjects
- Universals of topic-comment structure
- IV. Explaining universals
- The pragmatics of word order
- On the function of marked and unmarked terms
- Incorporation, parallelism, and focus
- On explaining some right-left asymmetries in syntactic and morphological universals
- The covariance of culture and grammar
- Author index
- Subject index
- Language index