This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain…
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…
This book is the first comprehensive survey of modals and modal constructions in the languages of Europe. It is a collaborative effort between scholars from Europe and the United States, stemming from a workshop on Modals in the Languages of Europe…
This book is the first to explore how much ofknowledge based on research on spoken languages needs to be refined in the light of the growing field of sign linguistics. Drawing upon a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the contributors focus on topi…
This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic ('typological') perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or A…
The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all auth…
This edited volume brings together fourteen original contributions to the on-going debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. The authors present a number of new vistas on language contact which represent new developments in t…
Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And e…
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…
The papers in this book describe and analyze rara in individuallanguages, covering an extraordinarily broad geographic distribution,including papers about languages from all over the globe. Therange of theoretical subjects discussed shows an enormou…
Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense tha…
Literally hundreds of languages world-wide have experienced direct or indirect Hispanisation during the heyday of the Spanish colonial empire. The number of languages which continue to borrow from Spanish on a daily basis is considerable especially…
This volume is a series of nine (9) contributions to our understanding of relativization strategies in eleven (11) languages of Cameroon spread into the seven (7) sub-branches of the Niger-Congo phylum: Ekoid, Mambiloid, Mamfe, Mbam, Narrow Bantu, W…
'Markedness' is a central notion in linguistic theory. This book is the firstto provide a comprehensive survey of markedness relationsacross various grammatical categories, in a sample of closely-related speech varieties. It is based on a sample of…
For several reasons, mostly inherent to the different developments of generative grammar, an increasing number of publications have dealt with reduplication in the past 20 years. Reduplication lends itself perfectly as a test field for theories that…
This book presents a selection of contributions to the workshop "Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages", held at the 30th Annual Convention of the German Society of Linguistics in Bamberg (February 27-29, 2008), and additiona…
This book promotes the development of linguistic databases by describing a number of successful database projects, focusing especially on cross-linguistic and typological research. It has become increasingly clear that ready access to knowledge abou…
The Iranian languages, due to their exceptional time-depth of attestation, constitute one of the very few instances where a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity is actually documented. Yet remarkably, within historical syntax, the Ira…
Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. Since individual partitives of different languages have been studied, there exists a…
Cross-linguistic studies on relative constructions in European languages are often centred on standard varieties as described in reference grammars. This volume breaks with the tradition in that it investigates relative constructions in non-standard…
