Language Typology and Historical Contingency

In honor of Johanna Nichols

Editors

Balthasar Bickel

| University of Zurich

Lenore A. Grenoble

| University of Chicago

David A. Peterson

| Dartmouth College

Alan Timberlake

| University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027206855 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027270801 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

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.

[Typological Studies in Language, 104] 2013. viii, 512 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.104

Table of Contents

Preface	vii–viii
Part I. Structures and typologies
Discourse semantics and the form of the verb predicate in Karachay-Balkar: A corpus-based and experimental study Andrej A. Kibrik	3–46
Typology and channel of communication: Where do signed languages fit in Dan I. Slobin	47–68
Marking versus indexing: Revisiting the Nichols marking-locus typology Nicholas Evans and Eva Fenwick	69–90
Head-marking languages and linguistic theory Robert D. Van Valin Jr.	91–124
Lessons of variability in clause coordination: Evidence from North Caucasian languages Aleksandr E. Kibrik	125–152
Noun classes grow on trees: Noun classification in the North-East Caucasus Keith Plaster, Maria Polinsky and Boris Harizanov	153–170
Affecting valence in Khumi David A. Peterson	171–194
Capturing diversity in language acquisition research Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel	195–216
Part II. Distributions in time and space
Who inherits what, when?: Toward a theory of contact, substrates, and superimposition zones Mark Donohue	219–240
Polysynthesis in the Arctic/Sub-Arctic: How recent is it? Michael Fortescue	241–264
A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone?: Lower Fungom in areal-historical perspective Jeff Good	265–282
A history of Iroquoian gender marking Michael Cysouw	283–298
The satem shift, Armenian siseṙn, and the early Indo-European of the Balkans Bill J. Darden	299–308
Penultimate lengthening in Bantu: Analysis and spread Larry M. Hyman	309–330
Culture and the spread of Slavic Alan Timberlake	331–356
The syntax and pragmatics of Tungusic revisited Lenore A. Grenoble	357–382
Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages Michael Cysouw and Bernard Comrie	383–394
Typologizing phonetic precursors to sound change Alan C.L. Yu	395–414
Distributional biases in language families Balthasar Bickel	415–444
The morphology of imperatives in Lak: Stem vowels in the second singular simplex transitive affirmative Victor A. Friedman	445–462
Subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman: Can an individual-identifying standard be developed? How do we factor in the history of migrations and language contact? Randy J. LaPolla	463–474
Part III. A (cautionary) note on methodology
Real data, contrived data, and the Yokuts Canon William F. Weigel	477–494
Language index	495–498
Name index	499–504
Subject index	505–512

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Everett, Caleb

2017. Languages in Drier Climates Use Fewer Vowels. Frontiers in Psychology 8

Sinnemäki, Kaius

2014. Cognitive processing, language typology, and variation. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 5:4 ► pp. 477 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 02 june 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Linguistics

Historical linguistics

Typology

Theoretical linguistics

BIC Subject: CFF – Historical & comparative linguistics

BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General

U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013038029