Full Description
What is the range of diversity in linguistic types, what are the geographical distributions for the attested types, and what explanations, based on shared history or universals, can account for these distributions? This collection of articles by prominent scholars in typology seeks to address these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology. The phenomena considered range from the phonological to the morphosyntactic, the areal coverage ranges in scale from micro-areal to worldwide, and the types of historical contingency range from contact-based to genealogical in nature. Together, the papers argue strongly for a view in which, although they use distinct methodologies, linguistic typology and historical linguistics are one and the same enterprise directed at discovering how languages came to be the way they are and how linguistic types came to be distributed geographically as they are.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. Part I. Structures and typologies; 3. Discourse semantics and the form of the verb predicate in Karachay-Balkar: A corpus-based and experimental study (by Kibrik, Andrej A.); 4. Typology and channel of communication: Where do signed languages fit in (by Slobin, Dan I.); 5. Marking versus indexing: Revisiting the Nichols marking-locus typology (by Evans, Nicholas); 6. Head-marking languages and linguistic theory (by Van Valin Jr., Robert D.); 7. Lessons of variability in clause coordination: Evidence from North Caucasian languages (by Kibrik, Aleksandr E.); 8. Noun classes grow on trees: Noun classification in the North-East Caucasus (by Plaster, Keith); 9. Affecting valence in Khumi (by Peterson, David A.); 10. Capturing diversity in language acquisition research (by Stoll, Sabine); 11. Part II. Distributions in time and space; 12. Who inherits what, when?: Toward a theory of contact, substrates, and superimposition zones (by Donohue, Mark); 13. Polysynthesis in the Arctic/Sub-Arctic: How recent is it? (by Fortescue, Michael); 14. A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone?: Lower Fungom in areal-historical perspective (by Good, Jeff); 15. A history of Iroquoian gender marking (by Cysouw, Michael); 16. The satem shift, Armenian sisern, and the early Indo-European of the Balkans (by Darden, Bill J.); 17. Penultimate lengthening in Bantu: Analysis and spread (by Hyman, Larry M.); 18. Culture and the spread of Slavic (by Timberlake, Alan); 19. The syntax and pragmatics of Tungusic revisited (by Grenoble, Lenore A.); 20. Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages (by Cysouw, Michael); 21. Typologizing phonetic precursors to sound change (by Yu, Alan C.L.); 22. Distributional biases in language families (by Bickel, Balthasar); 23. The morphology of imperatives in Lak: Stem vowels in the second singular simplex transitive affirmative (by Friedman, Victor A.); 24. Subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman: Can an individual-identifying standard be developed? How do we factor in the history of migrations and language contact? (by LaPolla, Randy J.); 25. Part III. A (cautionary) note on methodology; 26. Real data, contrived data, and the Yokuts Canon (by Weigel, William F.); 27. Language index; 28. Name index; 29. Subject index
