Rethinking universals : how rarities affect linguistic theory / / edited by Jan Wohlgemuth, Michael Cysouw

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910807768303321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berlin ; ; New York, : Mouton de Gruyter, 2010
• ISBN: 1-282-71636-0; 9786612716362; 3-11-022093-8
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (298 p.)
• Collana: Empirical approaches to language typology ; ; 45
• Classificazione: ER 715
• Altri autori (Persone): WohlgemuthJan; CysouwMichael
• Disciplina: 415.01
• Soggetti: Typology (Linguistics); Linguistic universals; Grammar, Comparative and general
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
• Nota di contenuto: The other end of universals: theory and typology of rara / Michael Cysouw & Jan Wohlgemuth -- Rarities in numeral systems / Harald Hammarström -- Additional rarities in the typology of numerals / Thomas Hanke -- Explaining typologically unusual structures: the role of probability / Alice C. Harris -- Right at the left edge: initial consonant mutations in the languages of the world / Pavel Iosad -- Quirky case: rare phenomena in case-marking and their implications for a theory of typological distributions / Andrej Malchukov -- Negatives without negators / Matti Miestamo -- Accounting for rare typological features in formal syntax: three strategies and some general remarks / Frederick J. Newmeyer -- Rara and grammatical theory /Jan Rijkhoff -- Pairwise comparisons of typological profiles / Søren Wichmann & Eric W. Holman -- Language endangerment, community size and typological rarity / Jan Wohlgemuth.
• Sommario/riassunto: Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And even when they did, they ; mostly just noted peculiar facts as ''quirks'' or ''unusual behavior'', without making too much of an effort at explaining them beyond calling them ''exceptions'' to various rules or generalizations. Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. Explaining the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other, is a reasonable and interesting challenge to any theory of how human language works. The present volume for the first time compiles selected papers on the study of rare linguistic features from various fields of linguistics and from a wide range of languages.