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This paper presents a preliminary survey of foot-sensitive phenomena and foot structure separate from prosodic prominence or classifications such as 'iambic' and 'trochaic'. It considers the evidence for and structure of the foot in a sample of 30 languages which demonstrate at least one foot-sensitive phenomenon which cannot be attributed to prosodic prominence. It finds that in the sample, there is considerable diversity in terms of: a) the type of evidence for and role played by the foot, b) the extent to which there is evidence for the foot, and c) the segmental structure of the foot. These findings demonstrate that the role of the foot is more diverse than often characterised. The findings of this paper also demonstrate that cross-linguistic differences between foot structures are more fine-grained than differences in the distribution of prosodic prominence or syllable weight; accounting for the diversity observed requires reference to the segmental structure of feet. In light of these findings, this paper calls for more examination of the prosodic foot separate from prosodic prominence, and which takes into consideration the variables of cross-linguistic diversity documented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of "headless" (or "antecedentless") relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004. On headed, headless, and light-headed relatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22. 95–126), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear. The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying 'I wore you asked me to wear'. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a typological overview of expletive negation based on a survey of 722 languages, focusing in detail on a smaller sample of five languages. Expletive negation (EN) has been discussed extensively within Romance linguistics. This paper surveys its occurrence across languages of the world and offers a comprehensive list of EN-triggering contexts collected from French and Mandarin, comparing that list with EN triggers in Januubi, English, and Zarma-Sonrai. The paper proposes a language production and semantic account of the similarity of EN-triggering contexts found in these five languages. We propose that the meaning of EN triggers entails or strongly implies ¬p and that the activation of ¬p alongside p is what leads speakers to produce EN. Four semantic licensing conditions for EN triggers are identified and each EN-triggering context is semantically analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a typology that sheds light on the diversity and complexity of comparative constructions across languages. Specifically, this study focuses on topic-prominent comparatives, a newly discovered type of comparative construction commonly found in East Asian languages, providing a comprehensive analysis of their features and subtypes. Drawing from a wide range of East Asian languages, this study delineates three subtypes of topic-prominent comparatives: double-comparatum comparatives ('Hair she is longer than me'), comparee-standard mismatched comparatives ('Her hair is longer than me'), and standard-topic comparatives ('My hair, her hair is longer'). Additionally, this study introduces a pair of new parameters: concrete measurement and abstract measurement of comparative degrees. Concrete measurement involves the use of precise numerical values or quantifiable units to make comparisons, such as three years in I am three years older than you. Conversely, abstract measurement involves the use of non-specific, relative terms to establish comparisons, such as much in I am much older than you. These parameters are positioned differently in some East Asian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's response to comments on his paper about sociolinguistic typology. In the paper, I attempted to shed light on complicated processes connected with sociolinguistic typology by dealing with the main factors which I hypothesize are involved, not as the continua that they in reality constitute, but as bipolar dyads. This was a methodological decision made on the basis of the fact that this was a programmatic paper attempting in a relatively small space to provide as straightforward an outline as possible of what is in fact a seriously complex issue. For example, in this paper, as in a number of others, I proposed that there are three societal factors that are likely to be relevant to the study of sociolinguistic typology. These factors are community size, social network structure and contact. As far as sociolinguistic factors are concerned, I have also distinguished between two different types of contact, long-term contact involving child bilingualism and short-term contact involving adult acquisition. Again, any actual real-life situation is likely to involve larger or smaller proportions of child versus adult learning, a further complication which I have for the time being avoided.

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a report regarding the five years of 'Linguistic Topology' journal.

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), has established a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of crosslinguistic colexification patterns. In its current form, it has proven to be a useful tool for various kinds of investigation into cross-linguistic semantic associations, ranging from studies on semantic change, patterns of conceptualization, and linguistic paleontology. But CLICS has also been criticized for obvious shortcomings, ranging from the underlying dataset, which still contains many errors, up to the limits of cross-linguistic colexification studies in general. Building on recent standardization efforts reflected in the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative (CLDF) and novel approaches for fast, efficient, and reliable data aggregation, we have created a new database for cross-linguistic colexifications, which not only supersedes the original CLICS database in terms of coverage but also offers a much more principled procedure for the creation, curation and aggregation of datasets. The paper presents the new database and discusses its major features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues about causation as a factor and goal in linguistic typological comparisons. Topics discussed include a summary of the January 2016 debate on language description and comparison, a summary of the March 2017 debate in which Martin Haspelmath proposed to group gender and classifier systems into one comparative category and preference for statements that include the clausal factor.

The article provides an overview of discussion papers, concerning the application of the reproducibility method in linguistic typology, that appeared in the January 2006 issue of "Linguistic Typology." A study by Haspelmath and Siegmund on implicational universals and by Maddieson on phonological complexity show that it is possible to replicate findings for a given set of hypotheses by means of different language samples. Meanwhile, Nichols, Barnes and Peterson similarly use different samples to test the same hypotheses on morphological complexity but also pose different research questions for the same language sample to show that lexical complexity can be modelled in different ways.

There is a challenging issue for linguistic typology which involves the relationships which might exist between societal type and aspects of linguistic structure. Linguistic-typological studies have provided us with insights into the range of structures available in human languages, but we do not yet have explanations for why, of all the possible structures available, particular languages select particular structures and not others. A legitimate sociolinguistic viewpoint would be that some social explanations may be available.The sociolinguistic factors suggested as being relevant are language contact versus isolation,and community size and network structure.This paper deals with this thesis from the point of view of Austronesian phonology, with particular reference to Polynesian phoneme inventories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the .sh raw in languages other than a few European ones.The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties,introducing a crosslinguistically applicable def- inition and delimiting it from other,semantically and/or morphosyntactically similar constructions.In particular,wewill show that the distinction between depictives and adverbials is much less clearcut,both in formal and semantic terms,than is often assumed.First,languages may not formally distinguish the two construction types.Second,in languageswith genuine depictive construc- tions distinct from adverbials,expressions that have generally been analysed as adverbials (e.g.,expressions of concomitance,manner,location,and even time)may exhibit the formal properties of depictives.As a consequence,we ar- gue that adverbial and depictive constructions are in competition,in the sense that languages may have different cut-off points for the two construction types on an implicational hierarchy ranging from typical depictive content to typical adverbial content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Greenberg's (1963) seminal paper, the implicational universal has been a standard tool for expressing typological generalisations. However, there is a major statistical problem with this tool, and also with implicational hierarchies, that has not attracted the attention that it deserves and that often leads to erroneous interpretations of data suggestive of implicational relationships. The problem is that a frequency in a sample that appears to be remarkably high or low does not necessarily mean anything. The saliency of a frequency in a typological sample depends on the deviation from the statistical expectation, not on the absolute number of occurrences. I will argue that implications should be interpreted as bidirectional statistical correlations with skewed initial parameters. Assuming directionality of interaction, as suggested by the use of arrows or other symbols expressing an asymmetry, is not warranted. However, some implications can be seen as markedness clines by reinterpreting the relative frequency of occurrence of the individual parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the claims of Quentin Atkinson of a linguistic signal that allows tracing language origin back to Africa. A synopsis of his thesis is presented that claims that the apparent drop in phonemic diversity as one moves away from Africa is a similar instance of the founder effect. The correlation between log population and his normalized phonemic diversity is discussed along with the reduction in phonemic diversity in relation to the founder effect, the time scale and the signal.

This paper attempts to summarise the discussion of senary, or base-6, numeral systems in this and the preceding issue of LT and to place the results for New Guinea in a wider typological perspective. In light of current crosslinguistic evidence about numeral bases, to be distinguished into construction-bases and cycle-bases, some universals on record need to be adjusted, while a couple of new universals can be suggested specifically for base-6 systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Differential R Marking (DRM) – i.e., the effects of animacy on the encoding of goals (R), as in ‘a linguist sent a book to the phonetician/to the town’ – from a crosslinguistic perspective. The phenomenon comprises three types, which are distinguished based on whether R can be marked in the same way as the transitive Patient or not (animate Rs usually allow this, while inanimate Rs usually surface as obliques). Even though DRM shares common features with Differential Object Marking (DOM), the two phenomena cannot be explained by the same functions. The findings of this article support the view that differences in object coding (comprising both DRM and DOM) are best explained by affectedness rather than ambiguity avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents several of the typologically most intriguing features of Hup, an endangered Nadahup (Makú) language spoken in the northwest Amazonian Vaupés region; these are differential object marking, evidentiality, noun classification, “bound” nouns and inalienable possession, and the multifunctional form teg. Each of these areas of Hup grammar and its typological significance are best understood within an approach that weaves explanation together with description, and in the process takes a view of language as a dynamic, non-autonomous system, which cannot be abstracted away from its own past or the culture and environment of its speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern linguistic typology is increasingly less concerned with what is possible in human languages (universals) and increasingly more with the question what's where why? (Bickel 2007). Moreover, as several recent papers in this journal show, typologists increasingly turn to quantitative approaches as a means to understanding typological distributions. In order to provide the quantitative study of typological distributions with a firm methodological foundation it is preferable to gain a grasp of simple facts before starting to ask the more complicated questions. In this article the only assumptions we make about languages are that (i) they may be partly described by a set of typological characteristics, each of which may either be found or not found in any given language; that (ii) languages may be genealogically related or not; and that (iii) languages are spoken in certain places. Given these minimal assumptions we can begin to ask how to express the differences and similarities among languages as functions of the geographical distances among them, whether different functions apply to genealogically related and unrelated languages, and whether it is possible to distinguish in some quantitative way between languages that are related and languages that are not, even when the languages in question are spoken at great distances from one another. Moreover, we may investigate the effects that factors such as ecology, migration, and rates of linguistic change or diffusion have on the degree of similarities among languages in cases where they are either related or unrelated. We will approach these questions from two perspectives. The first perspective is an empirical one, where observations primarily derive from analyses of the data of Haspelmath et al. (eds.) (2005). The second perspective is a computational one, where simulations are drawn upon to test the effects of different parameters on the development of structural linguistic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. An important trend in linguistic typology The first paper in the first issue of this journal (Kirby 1997) took on the question of the Keenan-Comrie accessibility hierarchy for relativization (Keenan & Comrie 1977). In a tightly argued presentation, Kirby showed that the effects of the hierarchy fall out from “competition” between two types of complexity. One is the structural complexity of the relative clause, which is calculated in part by counting the number of nodes dominating the trace or pronoun within the NP dominating the relative clause (see Hawkins 1994). The other is morphological complexity, which is calculated in part on the basis of the number of morphemes that need to be processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delocutive verbs can be defined as verbs derived from a base X which mean ‘by saying or uttering “X” (to someone) to perform an act which is culturally associated with the meaning or force of X’, where X is a variable ranging over types of things that can be said or uttered – 2nd person pronouns and other terms of address, words for asking and answering questions, formulaic expressions for social acts like greetings, various kinds of expressives, characterizations of speech peculiarities. Although originally identified as such in, and illustrated exclusively from, Indo-European languages by Debrunner (1956) and Benveniste (1958), delocutives are not confined to this family, but show a wide genetic and areal spread. The aim of this paper is to delineate the systematic possibilities for crosslinguistic diversity and for historical change in delocutive formations, and in particular to relate derivational delocutives to equivalent syntactic constructions. In such a wider typological and diachronic view, delocutives are seen not to be cases of ordinary quotation, nor a rare peculiarity at the margins of ordinary word formation, but to be one variation on the theme of complex predicates, instructively bearing on the general question of where verbs can come from. Their closest affinities, synchronic and diachronic, are to predications of existential causation ( doing/making, often found to subsume saying). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating Trudgill's correlation of phoneme inventory size with social factors, this paper highlights the role of phonological structure in the acquisition of phonological contrast, with particular reference to Turkic and Korean vowel inventories. Factors such as social dominance, isolation, and community size are shown not to provide plausible explanations for the loss of primary long vowels in most Turkic languages and their preservation in a few others, nor for the neutralization which long and short vowels currently undergo in Korean. It is suggested that such changes in phoneme inventories can be better understood as a result of phonetic and phonological processes involving the contrastive features and phonological contexts that define the phonemes in question. Processes referring to vowel length in Turkic and Korean are argued to have obscured its contrastive status in the organization of phonological knowledge by the speakers of these languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constitutes an essay in comparative lexical semantics and typology, comparing DIE verbs in eighteen languages. Crosslinguistically, DIE verbs, although referring to the same human event, differ in their inherent temporal (i.e., aspectual) phase structure. Primary DIE verbs, representative of Vendler's class of achievement verbs, provide not only an instructive case study of a sin-gle lexical verb, but also an excellent exemplar of the class type. It is proposed that the four types of DIE verbs identified--acute achievement, inceptive, resultative, and transitional--also constitute the potential range of all achievement verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a crosslinguistic study of the labial flap--an areal feature concentrated in north central Africa, but also attested in southeastern Africa and Indonesia. It is found in three of the four major African language families, but is likely not traceable to the proto-language of these families. Its most common articulation is a voiced labiodental flap with egressive lung air. It is fully incor-porated into the phonological system of at least thirteen languages, and there is good evidence for this in an additional nine languages. Consequently, theo-ries of phonological features or phonetic parameters must take it into account. It is most widely attested in the Adamawa-Ubangi branch of Niger-Congo, and this may be its ultimate source as well, supporting Greenberg's (1959, 1983) hypothesis concerning the source of some African areal features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the linguistic Typology, a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural and functional features. Topics discussed include information on the linguistic diversity; emergence of English as scientific lingua franca; and the cross-linguistic variation.

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 this paper. To substantiate them and to accommodate those that are found valid in theories of the Interface between phonology, morphology, and syntax remain as tasks for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely known that implosives are prevalent in African languages. While Sindhi is considered a textbook example of implosives in Indo-Aryan, the exact distribution of implosives, their development, and place typology are still poorly understood. The present study investigates the typology and evolution of implosives in Indo-Aryan languages and shows that the relationship between implosion and place of articulation in these languages is different from what is seen in global studies. We argue that the relatively high frequency of retroflex implosives in Indo-Aryan languages is due to the high frequency of retroflexes in those languages in general. The findings also indicate that South Asia is another hotspot where languages possess typologically-overloaded inventories of implosives at bilabial, dental-alveolar, retroflex, palatal, and/or velar places of articulation. The aerodynamic constraints and articulatory similarities between implosives and voiced geminates indicate a plausible sound change which led to the evolution of implosives in Indo-Aryan languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with estimative (also called 'tropative') constructions meaning 'find/consider X to be Y', where Y stands for a noun or an adjective. It systematically investigates morphological estimatives and their relationship to causative, applicative and denominal derivations from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In addition, the article presents a survey of periphrastic estimative strategies in the world's languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Senary Summary So Far," by Frans Plank in the Volume 13 of the book is presented.

On the basis of a sample of 424 languages or dialects, this article provides a typological-comparative investigation of designations for three major internal organs of the torso, the 'heart', the 'liver', and the 'lungs'. While colexification patterns are relatively unconstrained, the data show a skewing in morphologically complex terms: 'heart' and 'liver' often serve as head nouns in complex terms for 'lungs', but the reverse is rare. Another recurrent phenomenon is that two of the organs –sometimes 'heart' and 'lungs', but more frequently 'liver' and 'lungs'– share their head noun, and are distinguished from one another by modifiers that refer to their most salient characteristics, as in Azerbaijani aɣ ǯiyær 'white ǯiyær' = 'lungs' and gara-ǯiyær 'black-ǯiyær' = 'liver'. Having thus set the typological stage, I move on to discuss two different regions of the world in which such terms for 'lungs' and 'liver' have spread through language contact. This has happened in Eurasia, where the abovementioned pattern, which I call "explicitly dyadic", was brought from Turkish to vernaculars of the Balkans and, most likely through Azerbaijani influence, to languages of the Southern Caucasus. Similar explicitly dyadic terms, but based on a head noun meaning 'heart', also occur in the Andes, where they appear to have spread from Quechuan to Barbacoan languages. The evidence not only shows that 'liver' and 'lungs' form a "semantic dyad" in which designations make use of "opposed characteristics" in different regions of the world, but also that such designations are salient and therefore prone to spread in language contact situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If you ask a typologist what linguistic typology is about, the majority's answer will essentially be that it is all about linguistic diversity, about the values various features have in the languages of the world. If you press further, many would specify that typology is about what is typical of human language and what is not. In fact, the latter seems to be a natural extension of the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about implicational universals in linguistics. Concept of implicational universal; Types of interaction between parameters of linguistic variation; Inadequacy of a proposed definition of implicational universals.

The article provides information on the Pāṇini Grammar Award. The award was introduced by the Association for Linguistic Typology in 2006 to encourage and recognize achievements in the area of documenting the world's linguistic diversity through the writing of descriptive grammars. In order to qualify for the award, grammars need to provide a systematic, accessible, comprehensive, original, insightful, and typologically well-informed account of the workings of the language being described. The first award was presented to Patience Epps for her paper "Grammar of Hup."

Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of Linguistic Typology to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and particularly measurement, within modern typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent to which the way individuals describe spatial relationships correlates with features of the local landscape. Drawing on empirical data from two unrelated languages, Dhivehi (Indo-Aryan) and Marshallese (Austronesian), across a range of topographic environments, we examine the linguistic resources available to speakers, and spatial referential strategy preferences across languages and environments. We find that spatial language shows sensitivity to features of the topography, but this is mediated by the way speakers interact with the landscape. This leads us to propose a Sociotopographic Model, modelling the complex interplay of language structure, local environment, cultural practices, and language use, at odds with competing claims about the primacy of language or of environment in shaping spatial cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need for Language Typology and Language Contact Studies to become tighter. Topics discussed include patterns of language possibly reflecting long-term genealogical inheritance, contact-induced language change and functional and cognitive pressures, and the relevance of language typology.

We provide a critical review of the distinction between 'comparative concepts' and 'descriptive categories', showing that in current typological practice the former are usually dependent on the latter and are often vague, being organized around prototypes rather than having sharp boundaries. We also propose a classification of comparative concepts, arguing that their definitions can be based on similarities between languages or on differences between languages or can also be 'blind' to language-particular facts. We conclude that, first, comparative concepts and descriptive categories are ontologically not as distinct as some typologists would like to have it, and, second, that attempts at a 'non-aprioristic' approach to linguistic description and language typology are more of an illusion than reality or even a desideratum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brief comments are offered on crosslinguistic and single-language categories, the logical relationship between the two, and ways of testing the applicability of these notions in and across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many linguists maintain that the grammars of different languages are incommensurable. This poses the problem of how to compare them. One proposed solution is to distinguish between descriptive categories for individual languages and comparative categories for crosslinguistic comparisons. At the same time, it is also commonly assumed that language-internal variation can be described in a unitary manner, thereby presupposing that different dialects of the same language are commensurable. However, it is well known that the language-dialect distinction is not categorical but rather forms a continuum. This raises the question: Where lies the boundary between commensurability and incommensurability? This question is best addressed in terms of the notion of languoid, a cover term that includes languages, smaller entities such as dialects and registers, but also larger assemblages such as genealogical and areal groupings. This article proposes replacing the notion of language-specific descriptive category with that of languoid-associated descriptive category. Since languoids can be of arbitrary size, such categories may form the basis for crosslinguistic comparisons, alongside comparative categories. What this means is that different languoids, regardless of how close or distant they are to each other, may be commensurable with respect to some linguistic features but incommensurable with regard to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem of crosslinguistic rarity by mapping the types of diachronic factors that contribute to the rarity of a particular feature. It is proposed that a number of different diachronic factors may play a role, such as the rarity of source constructions, the rarity of particular types of change, the number of stages necessary for a particular feature to develop, and the number of pathways that can lead to a particular feature. This article looks at a rarissimum of person marking, namely, a zero-marked feminine 2nd singular person index in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic (Afroasiatic; Egypt). It is argued that such markers are rare because they presuppose rare input structures, and most processes of change would lead away from - rather than to - zero-marked 2sg. Furthermore, this study identifies a diachronic process in which a part of a morpheme is reinterpreted as a segmentable morpheme (in this case, a person index), thereby leading to the loss of a zero person marker. This is the converse of the well-known 'Watkins' Law', in which a segmentable person marker is reinterpreted as part of a base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the recently recognized concept of associated motion in 66 South American languages located on the western fringes of the Amazonian basin. In that region, associated motion is a widespread and particularly complex phenomenon. It is instantiated by verbal affixes in 44 languages, of which 22 display complex systems of multiple affixes. Correlations are noticed between the degree of complexity of the systems and the semantic content of the markers. Two implicational scales are proposed: (i) motion of the subject > motion of the object and (ii) prior motion > concurrent motion > subsequent motion. Correlations are also observed between the types of systems and their geographical distribution. These are taken as evidence that diffusion must have played an important role in spreading associated motion in this region and shaping its particular semantic make-up in the different languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers step-by-step instructions for linguistic typology, typological linguistics and information on the improvements of linguistic analysis and theory.

This article presents a typological overview of affricates. The inventories of languages in the genetically balanced UPSID 1992 survey are examined with respect to different distributional characteristics of affricates, like place of articulation, voicing, and segmental attributes. Moreover, the relation between affricates, plosives, and fricatives is considered. Independently of any particular formal modelling, this study aims to provide a picture of the crosslinguistic patterns of affricates, a category presenting many a challenge to phonological analysis and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although 'areality' and the idea of a linguistic area has become well-established in the literature, the notions remain controversial, mainly because of the lack of agreement about what constitutes linguistic areality and the subjective nature of their definition. This article follows the lead of Nichols 1992 and Bickel & Nichols 2006 in using statistical techniques for analysing the distribution of variables in different populations. We examine the frequency of occurrence of plosive prenasalisation in the Southeast Asia/New Guinea region as a test case for the robustness of simple statistical techniques and of more sophisticated techniques specifically designed for modelling the spatial distribution of variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is subject to typological variation. The empirical evidence comes from an experimental study on speaker's intuitions, which shows that some experiencer-object verbs in German and Modern Greek differ from canonical transitive verbs in agentivity and stativity, while experiencer-object verbs in Turkish, Yucatec Maya, and Chinese display the semanto-syntactic properties of canonical transitive verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's linguistic diversity is large, probably much larger than many linguists would want to admit. Dealing with this diversity is a central objective for worldwide crosslinguistic investigations. This article argues that to deal with diversity it is extremely fruitful to work with probable structures instead of possible structures, with models instead of theories, and with levels of justification instead of right or wrong. This is illustrated with the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun within a complex noun phrase. Different NP-internal orders have strongly differing frequencies among the world's languages. Various models to capture these frequencies are proposed and compared to each other, and it will be argued that very simple models are sufficient. For example, a highly adequate model only refers to the fact that noun and adjective tend to occur together, nouns and demonstratives prefer to occur at the phrase boundary, and noun-adjective order is slightly more frequent than adjective-noun order. The same approach will also be used to model sentence word order frequencies, including areal preferences as random effects. Using such probabilistic models allows for a new take on typological explanations. In and of itself, a probabilistic model is no explanation. However, a well-fitting model instantiates a reformulation of the original phenomenon to be explained into smaller, more tractable phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a crosslinguistic study of the association of event-oriented modal categories, particularly the potential and the necessitive, with non-canonical case marking of the subject and voice-related constructions. It is estimated that in at least a quarter of the languages of the world such an association exists. Voice-related constructions are much more strongly associated with the potential than with the necessitive, and the source constructions are overwhelmingly passive and spontaneous voice. Accordingly, a grammaticalization path from passive and spontaneous to potential can be posited. Furthermore, it was found that the expression of modality with non-canonical case marking patterns often originates in, or is associated with, possessive constructions, usually resulting in necessitive constructions. Possible motivations and contexts for the development of the constructions under investigation are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with discontinuous nominal expressions in three languages of the North Caucasus region: Lak (Nakh-Daghestanian), Circassian (Abkhaz-Adyghe), and Nogai (Turkic). It is argued that discontinuity in these languages can bring about “non-configurational” structure, where the noun and the modifier are co-dependents of the verb. Particular attention is paid to the opposition of “simple” and “inverted splits”, with the parts of the discontinuous nominals in their canonical or an inverted order. It is demonstrated that inverted splits in the languages under study regularly are morphologically more complex than simple splits. Some typological consequences of this observation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]