In recent years, issues of verbal valency, valency alternations and verb classes have seen a new upsurge of interest from a variety of perspectives. This book comprises articles investigating valency phenomena on a contrastive basis within Romance, Germanic and Slavic, and also in Basque and in the West-African language Ga, as well as classical Greek and Sanskrit. Phenomena include transitive and ditransitive constructions and alternations, involving reflexives, cognate objects, ’null’ objects, case (in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects), and infinitives, mostly in a synchronic perspective. Aiming at a closer understanding of the range of regularities falling within the concept of valency frames, the book offers a representative array of current assumptions, hypotheses, methodologies and new findings within the overall field. The volume will provide a valuable resource for researchers and students both in general linguistics and in the relevant language particular disciplines.

Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. Since individual partitives of different languages have been studied, there exists a basis for a more cross-linguistic approach. The purpose of this book is to fill the gap and to bring together research on partitives in different languages.

After a period of crisis in the 1960s, Contrastive Analysis has now regained its firm position, although in a different form and with broader goals. This collection of papers reflects the scope of research and the range of interest of linguists who are involved in contrastive linguistics research. The volume contains 35 contributions by 37 authors from 13 different countries and includes an Index of names and an Index of terms.

The Handbook of African Linguistics provides a holistic coverage of the key themes, subfields, approaches and practical application to the vast areas subsumable under African linguistics that will serve researchers working across the wide continuum in the field. Established and emerging scholars of African languages who are active and current in their fields are brought together, each making use of data from a linguistic group in Africa to explicate a chosen theme within their area of expertise, and illustrate the practice of the discipline in the continent.

The book offers the first full-scale focused treatment of linguistic indexicality as a tool for analysis and explanation of the organization of linguistic structures. The book demonstrates the application of the concept of indexicality in the description of a broad range of linguistic phenomena, from the internal workings of morphology via relations within syntactic constructions to lexical and grammatical elements designed to hook on to features outside the clause in the interactional context. The book offers a focused treatment of the general nature of linguistic indexicality in the larger perspective of the semiotics of language, including examinations of domain-straddling indexical functions. It presents studies of the role of indexicality in synchrony and diachrony with descriptive cases from a number of languages from diverse language families and it examines the way indexicality enters into the mechanisms of change, including examinations of semiotic shifts from indexical to symbolic function and vice versa. The book is relevant for researchers and students in historical and synchronic linguistics from a variety of linguistic frameworks with an interest in the role of semiotics in linguistic analysis.

While ample studies exist on ditransitives in various languages, notably from a typological perspective, more work needs to be done on identifying the main processes and factors that trigger and constrain the changes they undergo over time. The goal of this volume is to help fill this gap by bringing together data and information on individual languages that have thus far been left out of the discussion and by expanding our knowledge of already studied linguistic traditions so as to achieve a broader diachronic description. Since one of the distinctive features of ditransitives is their synchronic variability in terms of structural alternation and alignment split, diachronic research can throw up new insights into developmental dynamics that are eminently complementary; namely, on the one hand, the emergence, development and loss of construction alternation and, on the other, the acquisition of new functions over time. The analyses offered in the book yield different and interconnected answers to the general question of how ditransitives change by drawing on different functional principles that play a role in the diachronic reorganization of this dynamic domain and by providing a number of original theoretical suggestions.

This volume brings together work from leading specialists in Indo-European languages to explore the macro- and micro-dynamic factors that contribute to variation and change in alignment and argument realization. Alignment is taken to include both basic alignment patterns associated with major construction types, as well as various valency-decreasing constructions such as passives, anticausatives, and impersonals. The chapters explore synchronic and diachronic aspects of alignment morphosyntax based on data from Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Armenian, and Slavic. All have a strong empirical focus, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, and range from broad comparative studies to detailed investigations of specific constructions in individual languages. The book is one of very few studies to examine variation and change in alignment typology across languages in a single family. It contributes to a greater understanding of the roles played by analogy/extension, reanalysis, and areal factors in alignment change, and demonstrates the extent of variation found in the morphosyntax of argument realization in genetically-related languages.