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The papers in this book describe and analyze rara in individual
languages, covering an extraordinarily broad geographic
distribution, including papers about languages from all over the
globe. The range of theoretical subjects discussed shows an
enormous breadth, ranging from phonology through word formation,
lexical semantics to syntax and even some sociolinguistics.
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.
The questions as to why most languages appear to have more trouble
borrowing verbs than nouns, and as to the possible mechanisms and
paths by which verbs can be borrowed or the obstacles for verb
borrowing, have been a topic of interest since the late 19th
century. However, no truly substantial typological research had
been undertaken in this field before the present study. The present
work is the first in-depth cross-linguistic study on loan verbs and
the morphological, syntactic and sociolinguistic aspects of loan
verb accommodation. It applies current methodologies on database
management, quantitative analysis and typological conventions and
it is based on a broad global sample of data from over 400
languages and the typological data from the World Atlas of Language
Structures (WALS). One major result of the present study is the
falsification, on empirical grounds, of long-standing claims that
verbs generally are more difficult to borrow than other parts of
speech, or that verbs could never be borrowed as verbs and always
needed a re-verbalization in the borrowing language.
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