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Animacy influences the grammar of languages in different ways, although it often goes unnoticed. Did you know that in English there is a strong tendency towards using the Saxon genitive ’s with humans instead of the preposition of? Have you ever hear that some Chinantecan languages encode the animate/inanimate distinction in almost every word, and that in Hatam only human nouns distinguish plural number? This book offers for the first time a comprehensive cross-linguistic study of its effects on morphological systems. How do real data fit the theorethical definition of animacy? Do we observe different types of animacy? Which techniques are employed to encode it? Which categories and features are affected, and how? Data from more than 300 languages provide answers to these (and other) questions.
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Many works on linguistic typology deal in some detail with one or more particular grammatical topics without clearly demonstrating how these relate to other categories or construction types. The Essence of Linguistic Analysis by R. M. W. Dixon presents a framework which connects individual topics in a cogent and coherent way, showing their dependencies and locating each in its place within the overall tapestry of a language.
A clear distinction is made between semantic roles and syntactic functions. And it is held that the basic constituents of a language are lexical elements. Grammatical items serve to link together lexical units. At every level of analysis, the central units are lexical with grammar providing ancillary indicators.
Essays in Honour of Maria Steffen-Batóg and Tadeusz Batóg
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