In this book John A. Hawkins argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural options from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap.
This book sets out a new reconstruction for the Semitic case system. It is based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and relations in the attested Semitic languages and, for the first time, brings typological methods to bear in the study of these features in Semitic languages and their reconstruction for proto-Semitic. Professor Hasselbach supports her argument with detailed analyses of a wide range of data and presents it in a way that will be accessible to both Semitists and typologists.
Since the 1960s quantitative linguistics has undergone a great development marked especially by attempts to work systematically with language phenomena on all language levels. Besides traditional areas where significant results were already achieved before the 60s (phonology, graphemics and lexicology), quantitative linguistics has now also penetrated into morphology, syntax, stylistics, history and typology of languages and, more recently, into semantics. This book gives a comprehensive account of the various developments and applications in quantitative linguistics.After an overview of metho
"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of languages in written form.
Written language alternation has existed since ancient times. It is present today in a great deal of traditional media, and also exists in newer, less regulated forms such as email, SMS messages, and blogs.
The papers in this volume examine the current role of grammatical functions in transformational syntax in two ways: (i) through largely theoretical considerations of their status, and (ii) through detailed analyses for a wide variety of languages. Taken together the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive view of how transformational syntax characterizes the elusive but often useful notions of subject and object, examining how subject and object properties are distributed among various functional projections, converging sometimes in particular languages.
