1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821538403321

Titolo

From linguistic areas to areal linguistics / / edited by Pieter Muysken

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Amsterdam ; ; Philadelphia, : John Benjamins Pub. Co., c2008

ISBN

1-282-15203-3

9786612152030

90-272-9136-5

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (304 p.)

Collana

Studies in language companion series, , 0165-7763 ; ; v. 90

Altri autori (Persone)

MuyskenPieter

Disciplina

409

Soggetti

Areal linguistics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund / Viacheslav A. Chirikba -- East Nusantara as a linguistic area / Marian Klamer, Ger Reesink, and Miriam van Staden -- The Guapore-Mamore region as a linguistic area / Mily Crevels and Hein van der Voort -- An integrated areal-typological approach / Olga Mieska Tomic -- Zhuang / Rint Sybesma.

Sommario/riassunto

This paper deals with an areal feature shared by languages spoken in Indo-China and Southern China, namely, the presence of a modal element in a for these languages a-typical post-verbal position. In this paper we investigate the properties of this element in Cantonese, Lao, Vietnamese and Zhuang. One of the questions we focus on is the fact that the element in question can be translated with 'can', but the languages differ in that only in a subset of them, it can mean 'can-ability'. It turns out that the interpretational properties of the element is tightly interrelated with both syntactic and interpretational properties of the resultative construction.