This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages ...

This book presents a typological survey and analysis of the co-compound construction. This understudied phenomenon is essentially a compound whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meanings of its components, as when in some varieties of English 'mother-father' denotes 'parents'. In the course of the work Dr Walchi examines and discusses topics of great theoretical and linguistic interest. These include the notion of word, markedness, the syntax and semantics of coordination, grammaticalization, lexical semantics, the distinction between compounding and phrase formation, and the constructional meanings languages can deploy. The book makes many observations and points about typology and areal features and includes a wealth of unfamiliar data. It will be invaluable for typologists and of considerable interest to a variety of specialists including lexicologists, morphologists, construction grammarians, cognitive linguists, semanticists, field linguists, and syntacticians.

This book presents a typology of subordination systems across the world's languages. Traditional definitions of subordination are based on morphosyntactic criteria, such as clausal embedding or non-finiteness.

The book shows that these definitions are untenable in a cross-linguistic perspective, and provides a cognitively based definition of subordination.

This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific has never, until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different families.

This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework. The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchers in language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.