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.

The Sparkle Spa crew kick it into high gear to help Brooke out of a hairy situation in the ninth sparkly story in this shimmering series about two sisters who open their own mini-nail salon. Talk about a bad hair day! When Brooke gets a disastrous haircut—compliments of thorn-in-everyone’s-side Suzy Davis—she vows never to show her face in public again! Will the Sparkle Spa crew convince her otherwise?

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Earthquakes come and go as they please, leaving behind them trails of destruc tion and casualties. Although their occurrence is little affected by what we do or think, it is the task of earth scientists to keep studying them from all possible angles until ways and means are found to divert, forecast, and eventually control them. In ancient times people were awestruck by singular geophysical events, which were attributed to supernatural powers. It was recognized only in 1760 that earthquakes originated within the earth. A hundred years later, first systematic attempts were made to apply physical principles to study them. During the next century scientists accumulated knowledge about the effects of earthquakes, their geographic patterns, the waves emitted by them, and the internal constitution of the earth. During the past 20 years, seismology has made a tremendous progress, mainly because of the advent of modern computers and improvements in data acquisi tion systems, which are now capable of digital and analog recording of ground motion over a frequency range of five orders of magnitude. These technologic developments have enabled seismologists to make measurements with far greater precision and sophistication than was previously possible. Advanced computational analyses have been applied to high-quality data and elaborate theoretical models have been devised to interpret them. As a result, far reaching advances in our knowledge of the earth's structure and the nature of earthquake sources have occurred.