Books in the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory series

This book is the first exhaustive cross-linguistic study of imperatives and commands. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics, and offers fresh insights on the patterns of human interaction and cognition associated with them.

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. In doing so he systematically tests the supposition that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific.

Investigating cross-linguistic variation in the domains of all natural languages, this work views this domain as a cognitive space, the topography of which is the same for all languages. It brings together the research results in a universally applicable model, which can be read as a 'flow-chart' for the encoding of intransitive predications.

Presents a comprehensive survey of the auxiliary verb construction. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages, this book examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. Presented in a typological framework, it investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns.

In this book, Yan Huang provides an overview of the major contemporary issues surrounding anaphora and gives a critical survey of the many and diverse contemporary approaches to it. Dr Huang's survey and analysis are based on a rich collection of data drawn from around 450 of the world's languages.

Investigating noun phrases - linguistic constructions with the noun as central element - in a representative sample of around 6000 languages, this book proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure. It shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any language can be derived from three universal ordering principles.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. This book provides an analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It is for typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

Represents the study so far conducted on the typology of subordination (clause or sentence dependency). Based on an 80 language sample, this book provides a large amount of data on the coding of several types of complement, adverbial, and relative sentence.

Presents an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 160 languages drawn from the language families of the world. This book shows that some languages have a single copula, others several, and some none at all. It links the distribution of copulas to variations in lexical categorization and syntactic structure.

Investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking.

This book is the first comprehensive and encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns (expressions like someone, anything, nowhere) in the languages of the world. It shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. The author's discussion is based on data from about 200 languages from around the world.

Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. Based on an analysis of 350 languages, this pioneering study examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties.

This typological survey and analysis of co-compounds considers topics such as the notion of word, markedness, the syntax and semantics of coordination, grammaticalization, and lexical semantics, and draws on the author's original research on a wide range of languages.

This pioneering work draws on on data from over 400 languages from a wide range of language families to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession. It examines their interdependence with other typologies, and explores varieties of related grammaticalization processes.

This book presents the first systematic typological analysis of applicatives across African, American Indian, and East Asian languages. It is also the first to address their functions in discourse, the derivation of their semantic and syntactic properties, and how and why they have changed over time.

This study of pronouns is based on more than 250 languages. It contrasts personal pronouns with pronouns such as demonstratives, interrogatives, and relatives and shows that they belong to two distinct categories. Characteristics of the two categories are introduced and examined from a cross-linguistic and functional perspective.

This pioneering study of pronouns takes into account more than 250 languages. It contrasts personal pronouns with pronouns such as demonstratives, interrogatives, and relatives and shows that they belong to two distinct categories. Previously undiscovered characteristics of the two categories of pronouns are introduced and examined in detail from a cross-linguistic and functional perspective.