Explanation in typology
Publisher: Language Science Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Berlin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9783961101481; 9783961101474
Subjects: Historical & comparative linguistics
Description: This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as ?languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain? (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ?target-driven? by overarching functional-adaptive motivations.
Notes: Knowledge Unlatched 104800 Language Science Press 2018 - 2020

English.