The term "Suffixaufnahme" and an early typological embedding of this kind of agreement in case between a case-marked noun and a dependent noun, itself case-marked for dependency, is due to Franz ...Nikolaus Finck (1910). Finck's contention that Suffixaufnahme is something unusual was belittled, if only in the privacy of his study, by Hugo Schuchardt, at permanent loggerheads with Finck over typological issues. A re-examination of the status of Suffixaufnahme as a rarum, 27 years after a collective volume on this topic, Double Case (1995), bears out Finck as well as that collective project. However, the significance of questions posed by unequal crosslinguistic distributions is only beginning to be recognised now.
Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing ...diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research. The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. The distinctive feature of the series is its markedly empirical orientation. All conclusions to be reached are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. General problems are focused on from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of phenomena from little known languages, which shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics. The series is open to contributions from different theoretical persuasions. It thus reflects the methodological pluralism that characterizes the present situation. Care is taken that all volumes be accessible to every linguist and, moreover, to every reader specializing in some domain related to human language. A deeper understanding of human language in general, based on a detailed analysis of typological diversity among individual languages, is fundamental for many sciences, not only for linguists. Therefore, this series has proven to be indispensable in every research library, be it public or private, which has a specialization in language and the language sciences. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
Being
or
are not properties of entire languages, nor are they simple properties. There is a whole ränge of simple properties, all logically independent ofeach other, prominently including those ...ofseparation/ cumulation and invariance/variance. They are all properties ofindividual wordforms, and again there is no logical necessityfor these to agree in their property sets. This creates a huge potential for heterogeneity within andfor diversity across languages, which, if realized to the fall, would render morphological typology unviable. However, an examination ofsplits between Separation and cumulation and between invariance and variance along the lines ofword-classes, ofsubsets within single word-classes, of morphological categories, and ofterms ofcategories suggests that mixtures between agglutination and flexion, though multifarious, are not random. Ifgrammars arefound to be less heterogeneous, and languages less diverse, than they could be, this can be due to universal, timeless principles or to regularities ofchange. Both play a wie in shaping morphological Systems.
Or would it not? Has LT, short for Linguistic Typology, been mistitled? Is the journal’s name misleading or mystifying, sending prospective authors elsewhere and deterring rather than enticing the ...reading public, yearning though it is to be enlightened? ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy?As it is, the name consists of a relational adjective modifying a noun, and the construction is not wildly non-compositional. Perhaps regrettably, one sense of linguist, that which continues to be uppermost on the mind of the English-speaking man and woman in the street, is not saliently retained in linguistic(s), hence not in syntactic constructions that it enters, either.
Throughout its history, the hope has always been cherished that typology is holistic, and holism entails that there is systematic co-variation not only within levels or modules of grammar but also ...between them. Accordingly, numerous claims have been made that phonology does not vary across languages independently of morphology and syntax, and vice versa. The variables that are allegedly interrelated pertain to segment inventories, the shapes of syllables, morphemes, and words, phonological or morphonological rules, tones and accents, and rhythmic or prosodic patterns on the one hand and to analytic or (poly-)synthetic grammar, Separatist or cumulative morphological exponence, the complexity of grammatical units, and their linear order on the other. These claims are cataloguedin thispaper. To substantiate them and to accommodate those that are found valid in theories of the Interface between phonology, morphology, and syntax remain äs tasks for the future.
Grammaticalised reciprocal markers in Germanic derive from combinations of a quantifier and the alterity word ‘other’, elaborating on a minimalist strategy of identical NP repetition suggesting ...rather than expressing reciprocity (‘earls hated earls’). Subserved by quantifier floating, they develop fromfree to tighter syntactic combinations and eventually intomorphological units, tending towards complete inflectional deactivation. Sooner or later in all Germanic languages, the quantifier part of the reciprocal gets inside prepositional phrases (‘earls fought each/one with other’> ‘earls fought with each/one other’). German continues this fusional theme by combining the reciprocal with prepositions in compounds; and in Bavarian it eventually gets reduced further to a bound stem limited to (partly lexicalised) combinations with a preposition, thus being barred from the direct object relation, unlike the reflexive. In tracing this overall diachronic scenario, the question is raised of the pronominality (or pro-NP-hood) of reciprocals in Germanic. It is argued that, regardless of their nominal and referential source, reciprocals here strongly incline towards becoming adverbs of attenuated, situational rather than personal reference, highlighting the relational (role reversal) rather than the (co-)referential component of reciprocity, as is common also elsewhere.
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