1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910318334003321

Autore

Schmidtke-Bode Karsten

Titolo

Explanation in typology : diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence / / edited by Karsten Schmidtke-Bode, Natalia Levshina, Susanne Maria Michaelis, Ilja A. Seržant

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, : Language Science Press, 2019

Berlin, Germany : , : Language Science Press, , [2019]

©2019

ISBN

3-96110-147-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 258 pages) : PDF, digital file(s)

Collana

Conceptual foundations of language science ; ; 3

Disciplina

410.1

Soggetti

Typology (Linguistics)

Historical & comparative linguistics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Sommario/riassunto

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.