Recently published

[Frans Plank]

Recently Published and of Typological Interest / ii 2011



New publications of potential typological interest are periodically  
advertised on the lingtyp list.  Apart from directly commissioning  
reviews, LT solicits offers from lingtypists to review books – those  
listed here or whichever others you’d like to add on your own  
understanding of the attribute “typologically relevant”.  (And do  
construe its scope liberally!)  For purposes of book reviewing in LT,  
what matters is that REVIEWS are done from a distinctively typological  
angle, from whatever angles the books reviewed are done.  Prospective  
reviewers so intentioned please get in touch.



Drop me a line with bibliographical particulars if you want to make  
sure your own relevant publications will be included in the next  
listing.  The most effective indication of the existence of a new  
relevant book is the receipt of a review copy;  do remind your  
publisher to send one to:



LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY,

Sprachwissenschaft,

Universität Konstanz,

78457 Konstanz, Germany.



Regrettably, many previously listed titles have remained unreviewed in  
LT.  However, typological publications can have long shelf-lives, and  
you’re welcome to make your pick and review now what has been listed  
before and is not past the sell-by date.



Do feel free to also offer to review grammars for LT (again, from a  
distinctively typological angle).  Some are included in our listings  
here, but eventually THE GRAMMAR WATCH on the ALT website should pick  
up again where we left off a while ago.



Frans Plank

frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de





Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. & Pieter C. Muysken, with Joshua Birchall  
(eds.). 2011. Multi-verb constructions: A view from the Americas.  
Leiden: Brill.

[One of the most complex topics in the study of the indigenous  
languages of the Americas, and indeed in the study of any language  
set, is the complex behaviour of multi-verb constructions. In many  
languages, several verbs can co-occur in a sentence, forming a single  
predicate. This book contains a first survey of such constructions in  
languages of North, Middle, and South America. Though it is not a  
systematic typological survey, the combined insights from the various  
chapters give a very rich perspective on this phenomenon, involving a  
host of typologically diverse constructions, including serial verb  
constructions, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs, incorporated  
verbs, etc. Aikhenvald's long introduction puts the chapters into a  
single perspective.  [Publishers]]





Amiridze, Nino, Boyd H. Davis, & Margaret Maclagan (eds.). 2010.  
Fillers, pauses and placeholders (TSL 93). Amsterdam: Benjamins.





Ansaldo, Umberto, Jan Don, & Roland Pfau (eds.). 2010. Parts of  
speech: Empirical and theoretical advances. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[Studies in Language 32 (3) 2008 recycled.  Or, as Benjamins put it:   
"Benjamins Current Topics.  Special issues of established journals  
tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those  
journals.  For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special  
issues have been selected containing salient topics of research with  
the aim to widen the readership and to give this interesting material  
an additional lease of life in book format."  Strange discipline,  
linguistics, where journals -- which in other fields is where the  
action is -- need such an "additional lease of life"!  [FP]]





Bohnemeyer, Jürgen & Eric Pederson (eds.). 2011. Event representation  
in language and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Bril, Isabelle (ed.). 2010. Clause linking and clause hierarchy:  
Syntax and pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross- 
linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I  
presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and  
distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods  
based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic  
comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause- 
chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars.  
Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics,  
and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to  
informational structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative  
constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and  
subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional  
morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with  
informational hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of  
illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of  
particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause- 
linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and  
semantics. [Publishers]]





Cairns, Charles E. & Eric Raimy (eds.). 2011. Handbook of the  
syllable. Leiden: Brill.

[The Handbook of the Syllable approaches the study of the phonology  
and phonetics of the syllable with theoretical, empirical and  
methodological heterogeneity as its guiding principle. Since the mid- 
nineteenth century, scholars in the phonetic and phonological sciences  
have found it convenient to refer to the syllable, but definitions are  
scarce and none apply to all areas where the syllable is frequently  
invoked. The Handbook’s seventeen chapters focus on empirical studies  
of the syllable by presenting both new data and new kinds of data. The  
work addresses the syllable in phonology, phonetics, experimental  
psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, and  
orthography. It is a seminal reference book for researchers exploring  
any empirical area where the notion of “the syllable” is invoked.   
[Publishers]]





Chelliah, Shobhana L. & Willem J. de Reuse. 2011. Handbook of  
descriptive linguistic fieldwork. Dordrecht: Springer.

[Broad scope and coverage from four points of view: the geographical,  
the historical, the philosophical and the encyclopedic.

Includes detailed discussions of the theoretical, practical and  
ethical issues involved in language selection, data collection, data  
management.

A survey of past and present approaches and solutions to problems in  
the field, and the historical, political, and social variables  
correlating with fieldwork in different areas of the world.

This handbook provides the most comprehensive reference on linguistic  
fieldwork on the market bringing together all the reader needs to  
carry out successful linguistic fieldwork. The book is based on the  
experiences of two veteran linguistic fieldworkers and advice from  
more than twenty active fieldwork researchers. They provide an  
encyclopedic review of current publications on linguistic fieldwork  
and offer a unique survey of past and present approaches and solutions  
to problems in the field. They also examine the historical, political,  
and social variables correlating with fieldwork in different areas of  
the world. The book includes information omitted in most other texts  
on the subject, such as the collection, representation, management,  
and methods of extracting grammatical information from discourse and  
conversational data. Extensive practical fieldwork tips are provided,  
as well as a handy sketch of major typological features for use in  
linguistic analysis.  [Publishers]]





Choi-Jonin, Injo, Marc Duval, & Olivier Soutet (eds.). 2010. Typologie  
et comparatisme: Hommages offerts à Alain Lemaréchal (Orbis  
Supplementa 28). Leuven: Peeters.

[Ce recueil d'études s'ouvre sur une présentation de la carrière et  
des travaux d'Alain Lemaréchal, Professeur à l'Université Paris- 
Sorbonne, Directeur d'études à l'École Pratique des Hautes Études et  
auteur d'une œuvre importante en linguistique générale, typologique et  
historico-comparative. C'est dans cette triple perspective que  
s'inscrivent les 28 contributions de ce volume d'hommages, offert par  
ses collègues et amis. Abordant des questions de méthodologie et de  
théorisation, ce recueil offre un panorama riche des différentes  
niveaux de la description linguistique: phonétique et phonologie,  
morphologie et syntaxe, sémantique, lexicologie, énonciation. Les  
données analysées dans les diverses contributions ont été puisées dans  
une vaste gamme de langues: langues indo-européennes anciennes et  
modernes, basque, langues bantoues, famille austronésienne, langues  
caucasiennes, groupe altaïque et langues apparentées, enfin quelques  
langues amérindiennes. [Publishers]]





Durst-Andersen, Per. 2011. Linguistic supertypes: A cognitive-semiotic  
theory of human communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

[The book offers a completely new view of language and of languages  
such as Russian, Chinese, Bulgarian, Georgian, Danish and English by  
dividing them into three supertypes on the basis of a step-by-step  
examination of their relationship to perception and cognition, their  
representation of situations and their use in oral and written  
discourse. The dynamic processing of visual stimuli involves three  
stages: input (experience), intake (understanding) and outcome (a  
combination). The very choice among three modalities of existence  
gives a language a certain voice -- either the voice of reality based  
on situations, the speaker's voice involving experiences or the  
hearer's voice grounded on information. This makes grammar a prime  
index: all symbols are static and impotent and need a vehicle, i.e.  
grammar, which can bring them to the proper point of reference.  
Language is shown to be a living organism with a determinant category,  
aspect, mood or tense, which conquers territory from other potential  
competitors trying to create harmony between verbal and nominal  
categories. It is demonstrated that the communication processes are  
different in the three supertypes, although in all three cases the  
speaker must choose between a public and a private voice before the  
grammar is put into use. [Publishers]]





Götzsche, Hans (ed.). 2010. Memory, mind and language. Cambridge:  
Cambridge Scholars Publication.

[Memory, Mind and Language celebrates the 30th anniversary of the The  
Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL) and the main contribution is the  
history of those first 30 years.  [Publishers]]





Hagège, Claude. 2010. Adpositions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[This pioneering study is based on an analysis of over 200 languages  
[recte: precisely 434!  author's count.  But are OUP misinforming  
potential readers?  434 is over 200, it's also over a dozen ...  
[FP]]], including African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo- 
European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan,  
Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are an  
almost universal part of speech. English has prepositions; some  
languages, such as Japanese, have postpositions; others have both; and  
yet others kinds that are not quite either. As grammatical tools they  
mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence:  
characteristically one element governs a noun or noun-like word or  
phrase while the other functions as a predicate. From the syntactic  
point of view, the complement of an adposition depends on a head: in  
this last sentence, for example, a head is the complement of on while  
on a head depends on depends and on is the marker of this dependency.  
Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their  
usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing.  
Claude Hagege examines their morphological features, syntactic  
functions, and semantic and cognitive properties. He does so for the  
subsets both of adpositions that express the relations of agent,  
patient, and beneficiary, and of those which mark space, time,  
accompaniment, or instrument. Adpositions often govern case and are  
sometimes gradually grammaticalized into case. The author considers  
the whole set of function markers, including case, that appear as  
adpositions and, in doing so, throws light on processes of  
morphological and syntactic change in different languages and language  
families. His book will be welcomed by typologists and by  
syntacticians and morphologists of all theoretical stripes.  
[Publishers]]





Hieda, Osamu, Christa König, & Hisosi Naakagawa (eds.). 2011.  
Geographical typology and linguistic areas: With special reference to  
Africa. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[Is Africa a linguistic area (Heine & Leyew 2008)? The present volume  
consists of sixteen papers highlighting the linguistic geography of  
Africa, covering, in particular, southern Africa with its Khoisan  
languages. A wide range of phenomena are discussed to give an overview  
of the pattern of social, cultural, and linguistic interaction that  
characterizes Africa's linguistic geography. Most contributors to the  
volume discuss language contact and areal diffusion in Africa,  
although some demonstrate, with examples from non-African linguistic  
data, including Amazonian and European languages, how language contact  
may lead to structural convergence. Others investigate contact  
phenomena in social-cultural behavior. The volume makes a large  
contribution toward bringing generalized theory to data-oriented  
discussions. It is intended to stimulate further research on contact  
phenomena in Africa.  [Publishers]]





Kiyosawa, Kaoru & Donna Geerdts. 2010. Salish applicatives. Leiden:  
Brill.

[This book offers a comprehensive view of the morphology, syntax, and  
semantics of applicatives in Salish, a language family of northwestern  
North America. Applicative constructions, found in many polysynthetic  
languages, cast a semantically peripheral noun phrase as direct  
object. Drawing upon primary and secondary data from twenty Salish  
languages, the authors catalog the relationship between the form and  
function of seventeen applicative suffixes. The semantic role of the  
associated noun phrase and the verb class of the base are crucial  
factors in differentiating applicatives. Salish languages have two  
types of applicatives: relationals are formed on intransitive bases  
and redirectives on transitive ones. The historical development and  
discourse function of Salish applicatives are elucidated and placed in  
typological perspective.  [Publishers]]





Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, & Richard  
Cook. 2010. World color survey. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

[The 1969 publication of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms  
proved explosive and controversial. Contrary to the then-popular  
doctrine of random language variation, Berlin and Kay's multilingual  
study of color nomenclature indicated a cross-cultural and almost  
universal pattern in the selection of colors that received abstract  
names in each language. The ensuing debate helped reform the views of  
anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists alike.  After four  
decades in print, Basic Color Terms now has a sequel: in this book,  
Kay, Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard S. Cook  
authoritatively extend the original survey, studying 110 additional  
unwritten languages in detail and in situ. The results are presented  
even more clearly than before, with charts showing the overall palette  
of color terms within each language as well as the levels of agreement  
among speakers. The raw data are also available online. [CSLI]]


Keine, Stefan. 2010. Case and agreement from Fringe to Core: A  
Minimalist approach. Berlin: De Gruyter Niemeyer.

[This book explores the view that impoverishment and Agree operations  
are part of a single grammatical component. The architecture set forth  
here gives rise to complex but highly systematic interactions between  
the two operations. This interaction is shown to provide a unified and  
general account of apparently diverse and unrelated intances of  
eccentric argument encoding that so far have remained elusive to a  
unified theoretical account. The proposed view of the grammatical  
architecture achieves an integration of these phenomena within better- 
studied languages and thus gives rise to a more general theory of case  
and agreement phenomena. The empirical evidence on the basis of which  
the proposal is developed draws from a wide range of typologically non- 
related languages [?], including Basque, Hindi, Icelandic, Itelmen,  
Marathi, Nez Perce, Niuean, Punjabi, Sahaptin, Selayarese, Yukaghir,  
and Yurok. The proposal has far-reaching consequences for the study of  
grammatical architecture, linguistic interfaces, derivational locality  
in apparently non-local dependencies and the role of functional  
considerations in formal approaches to the human language faculty.   
[Publishers]]





Lefebvre, Claire (ed.). 2011. Creoles, their substrates, and language  
typology. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[Since creole languages draw their properties from both their  
substrate and superstrate sources, the typological classification of  
creoles has long been a major issue for creolists, typologists, and  
linguists in general. Several contradictory proposals have been put  
forward in the literature. For example, creole languages typologically  
pair with their superstrate languages (Chaudenson 2003), with their  
substrate languages (Lefebvre 1998), or even, creole languages are  
alike (Bickerton 1984) such that they constitute a “definable  
typological class” (McWhorter 1998). This book contains 25 chapters  
bearing on detailed comparisons of some 30 creoles and their substrate  
languages. As the substrate languages of these creoles are  
typologically different, the detailed investigation of substrate  
features in the creoles leads to a particular answer to the question  
of how creoles should be classified typologically. The bulk of the  
data show that creoles reproduce the typological features of their  
substrate languages. This argues that creoles cannot be claimed to  
constitute a definable typological class.  [Publishers]]





Maas, Utz. 2010.  Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschsprachiger  
Sprachforscher 1933–1945. Vol. 1: Dokumentation: Biobibliographische  
Daten A–Z. Vol. 2: Auswertungen: Verfolgung – Auswanderung –  
Fachgeschichte – Konsequenzen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.





Moro, Andrea. 2010. The boundaries of Babel: The brain and the enigma  
of impossible languages. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro tells the story of an  
encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics  
and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a  
biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The  
development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to  
enrich the "biolinguistic perspective" and extend it beyond an  
abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in  
the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in  
the new imaging technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this.

Moro examines what he calls the "hidden" revolution in contemporary  
science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not  
infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical  
but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, he claims,  
will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics  
and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches  
for neurobiological correlates of "the boundaries of Babel"—the  
constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages—by  
using an original experimental design based on artificial languages.  
He offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from  
linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax,  
then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two  
neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two  
neuroimaging techniques used (positron emission topography, or PET,  
and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), but makes it  
clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data  
without a sound theoretical framework. Finally, he discusses some  
speculative aspects of modern research in biolinguistics regarding the  
impact of the linear structure of linguistics expression on grammar,  
and more generally, some core aspects of language acquisition,  
genetics, and evolution.  [Publishers]]





Reuland, Eric J. 2011. Anaphora and language design. Cambridge, MA:  
MIT Press.





Rothstein, Björn & Rolf Thieroff (eds.). 2011. Mood in the languages  
of Europe. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[Green cover, but a shade darker than the EUROTYP volumes.  Great  
chapter titles, too! [FP]]





Sun, Hongkai & Guangkun Liu. 2009. Languages of the Greater Himalayan  
region, volume 9: A grammar of Anong: Language death under intense  
contact. (Translated, annotated, and supplemented by Fengxiang Li, Ela  
Thurgood & Graham Thurgood.) Leiden: Brill.

[A work that will be of interest to those interested in typology,  
language history, and contact induced change, this book documents the  
radical restructuring of Anong over the last 40 years under intense  
contact with Lisu. In the almost fifty years, Sun Hongkai has been  
documenting the Anong language of Yunnan China, it has undergone  
radical, contact-induced changes. The language of the less than forty  
remaining speakers is quite different than the Anong of forty years  
ago. Under intense contact with Lisu, major change has occurred in the  
language, much of it documented in this work of Sun's. The English  
edition is a reworking of the original Chinese version, providing  
annotation, an expanded lexicon, and an appendix that contains an  
instrumental study of the language.  [Publishers]]





Völkel, Svenja. 2010. Social structure, space and possession in Tongan  
culture and language: An ethnolinguistic study. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[Footnote 18, page 22:  "This means that the ergative particle marks  
the nominal subject of an intransitive verb as well as the nominal  
object of a transitive verb while the absolutive particle introduces  
the nominal subject of a transitive verb (cf. Dixon 1994: 1, 42)."]







Frans Plank
Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Konstanz
78457 Konstanz
Germany

Jan-Apr 2011:
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics
University of Oxford
Walton Street
Oxford OX1 2HG
England

eMail:  frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de




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