Rethinking Universals: How Rarities Affect Linguistic Theory: 45 - Rilegato

 
9783110220926: Rethinking Universals: How Rarities Affect Linguistic Theory: 45

Sinossi

Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And even when they did, they mostly just noted peculiar facts as ''quirks'' or ''unusual behavior'', without making too much of an effort at explaining them beyond calling them ''exceptions'' to various rules or generalizations.

Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. Explaining the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other, is a reasonable and interesting challenge to any theory of how human language works.

The present volume for the first time compiles selected papers on the study of rare linguistic features from various fields of linguistics and from a wide range of languages.

Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.

Informazioni sull?autore

Jan Wohlgemuth and Michael Cysouw, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.

Altre edizioni note dello stesso titolo

9783111732930: Rethinking Universals: How Rarities Affect Linguistic Theory: 45

Edizione in evidenza

ISBN 10:  3111732932 ISBN 13:  9783111732930
Casa editrice: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010
Brossura