Books in the Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT] series

This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.

Sequences such as English ¿with regard tö have been described by some as complex prepositions (multi-word equivalents of prepositions), while others have said there is no such category. With diachronic corpus-based studies on fifteen different languages, the studies brought together in this volume show the regularities and specificities of such constructions in European languages with different cultural backgrounds and typological features.

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, Wide Grassfields, Yemne-Kimbi. As a productive strategy in the world's languages, and considering the evidence that the African language are either under-described, poorly described or not described at all, investigations into the forms, structures and functions of relative clauses and relativization start filling the gap of the absence of analytical descriptive works on the topic. The papers dwelt on the construction of relative clauses, their structure and constraints, their morphosyntactic properties, how they are used to give prominence to topics or participants that are thematic in a given discourse, and to mark the boundaries of units of text, and the formal characteristics of restrictive relative clause constructions. The findings generated so far constitute an endless tank for many fields of hyphenated linguistics including general linguistics, cognitive linguist, applied psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics and pragmatics.

Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. This book brings together research on partitives in different languages.

Presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic perspective. This book is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages. It intends to bring together language typology and the Egyptian-Coptic language in an explicit fashion.

This comprehensive study concentrates particularly on the use of a closed set of motion verbs in five of the major dialects, including Mandarin, W, Hakka, Min and Cantonese. The author shows that these dialects form a continuum with some exhibiting more characteristics of a verb-framed language than the others. The phenomenon reflects the various stages of typological transformation and grammaticalization that the dialects have undergone.

A comparative study of complementizer semantics in European languages. It focuses on semantics, but related issues such as the syntax, morphology and diachrony of complementizers, and their omission and combination are also discussed. It also contains contributions from experts of individual languages and language families.

The volume investigates the different alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan and shows that the variation of alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan goes beyond the opposition between accusativity and ergativity. The book includes a thorough discussion of the concepts and terminology relating to alignment patterns. The study draws extensively on new language data from Indo-Aryan. It includes discussions of examples taken from Hindi, Sanskrit, Apabhramsa, Asamiya, Bangla, Oriya, the Bihari languages, Nepali, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Siraiki, Poguli, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marwari, Harauti, the Hindi varieties, and Shina. The volume offers a comprehensive overview of various alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan based on a wide range of data. By focusing on lesser known Indo-Aryan languages, the study questions the central position of Hindi-Urdu in the research on ergativity. Each language is treated in its own right, with a focus on language-specific data and analyses, rather than relying on a notional format that starts with pre-established linguistic concepts. In accordance with this methodology, much attention is paid to "e;indirect"e; connections between ergative constructions and other syntactic and semantic patterns in the various languages.

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 varieties from a multidisciplinary perspective and addresses a crucial question: what does Europe's typological panorama actually look like?

The Sound Structure of Modern Irish contains a comprehensive description of the phonology of Irish. Based on the main forms of the language, it offers an analysis of the segments and the processes in its sound system. Each section begins with a description of the area of phonology which is the subject - such as stress patterns, phonotactics, epenthesis or metathesis - and then proceeds to consider the special aspects of this subject from a theoretical and typological perspective.The book pays particular attention to key processes in the sound system of modern Irish. The two most important of these are palatalisation and initial mutation, phenomena which are central to Irish and the analysis of which has consequences for general phonological theory.The other main emphasis in the book is on a typological comparison of several different languages, all of which show palatalisation and/or initial mutation as part of their systems. The different forms of Celtic, Slavic languages, Romance dialects and languages along with languages such as Finnish, Fula, Nivkh and Southern Paiute are considered to find out how processes which are phonetic in origin (external sandhi) can become functionalised and integrated into the morphosyntactic system of a language.

A collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. It covers such geographical regions as the Americas, the Caucasus, Asia, and Near East.

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 that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.

This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages.

The contributions address several levels of the language system including morphology, syntax and lexicology, and put special emphasis on mechanisms of internal and contact-induced language change spanning different epochs and societal and textual strata.

Presents fourteen contributions to the debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. This volume also presents a number of vistas on language contact which represent developments in the field. It provides readers with insights on various levels of language-contact related studies.

A collection of papers on modals in the languages of Europe. It provides readers with a wealth of data and addresses the issues of under which circumstances modals are borrowed, from which linguistic materials they typically arise in these languages, and whether and how modals form a system which is separate from other word classes.