Research Catalog

Title

Approaches to language typology / edited by Masayoshi Shibatani and Theodora Bynon.

Publication

Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Shibatani, Masayoshi.
• Bynon, Theodora.

Description

ix, 381 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• What do all languages have in common, and what gives each language its individuality? Language typology, which has developed in response to these fundamental questions, is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of possible human languages and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation.
• Language typology is a major concern of all contemporary schools of linguistics, yet a coherent image of the field is difficult to form because of the diversity of theoretical orientations and practical methodologies.
• This collection brings together for the first time original contributions from major schools of typological research, from the Prague School to the Generative Grammar tradition. Leading scholars offer first-hand accounts of the theoretical foundations and substantive findings of their particular school of thought, clarifying basic assumptions which are often not explicitly stated in the literature.
• The collection as a whole provides both a survey of the place of individual typological schools in the historiography of the subject and a comprehensive account of the present state of language typology in an international context. It gives an overview of both the underlying unity of and the differences in the methods employed in the field.

Subject

• Typology (Linguistics)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Approaches to Language Typology: A Conspectus / Masayoshi Shibatani and Theodora Bynon -- 2. Typological Comparison: Towards a Historical Perspective / Paolo Ramat -- 3. Prague School Typology / Petr Sgall -- 4. Modern Syntactic Typology / William Croft -- 5. The Diachronic Typological Approach to Language / Joseph H. Greenberg -- 6. Typological Research on Actancy: The Paris RIVALC Group / Gilbert Lazard -- 7. The St Petersburg/Leningrad Typology Group / Vladimir P. Nedjalkov and Viktor P. Litvinov -- 8. Cognitive-Conceptual Structure and Linguistic Encoding: Language Universals and Typology in the UNITYP Framework / Hansjakob Seiler -- 9. The Principles-and-Parameters Approach: A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese / Naoki Fukui.

ISBN

0198242719

LCCN

94038658

OCLC

• 31241723
• ocm31241723

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries