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On Comitatives and Related Categories - A Typological Study with Special Focus on the Languages of Europe (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R9,128
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On Comitatives and Related Categories - A Typological Study with Special Focus on the Languages of Europe (Hardcover)
Series: Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired
crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as
the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages
world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test
and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the
grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. Three types of
languages are identified according to the morphological treatment
of the comitative and its syncretistic association with other
concepts. It is shown that the structural behaviour of comitatives
is areally biassed and that the languages of Europe tend to diverge
from the majority of the world's languages. This has important
repercussions for a language-independent definition of the
comitative. The supposed conceptual closeness of comitative and
instrumental is discussed in some detail and a semantic map of the
comitative is put forward. Markedness is the crucial concept for
the evaluation of the relation that ties comitatives and
instrumentals to each other. In a separate chapter, the diachrony
of comitatives is looked into from the perspective of
grammaticalisation research. Throughout the book, the argumentation
is richly documented by empirical data. The book contains three
case-studies of the comitative in Icelandic, Latvian and Maltese -
each of which represents one of the three language types identified
earlier in the text. For the purpose of comparing the languages of
Europe, a chapter is devoted to the analysis of a large parallel
literary corpus (covering 64 languages) which reveals that the
parameters of genetic affiliation, areal location and typological
classification interact in intricate ways when it comes to
predicting whether or not two languages of the sample behave
similarly as to the use to which they put their comitative
morphemes. With a view to determining the degree of similarity
between the languages of the European sub-sample, methods of
quantitative typology are employed. General linguists with an
interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation
researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book
as an important contribution to their respective fields of
interest. We regret that, due to a PDF problem, the figure on page
111 is partly shown in black. Please find the correct table here.
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