Bücher der Reihe Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory

Investigating noun phrases - linguistic constructions with the noun as central element - in a representative sample of around 6000 languages, this book proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure. It shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any language can be derived from three universal ordering principles.

This book is the first comprehensive and encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns (expressions like someone, anything, nowhere) in the languages of the world. It shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.

Represents the study so far conducted on the typology of subordination (clause or sentence dependency). Based on an 80 language sample, this book provides a large amount of data on the coding of several types of complement, adverbial, and relative sentence.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. This book provides an analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It is for typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

In this book, Yan Huang provides an overview of the major contemporary issues surrounding anaphora and gives a critical survey of the many and diverse contemporary approaches to it. Dr Huang's survey and analysis are based on a rich collection of data drawn from around 450 of the world's languages.

This study of pronouns is based on more than 250 languages. It contrasts personal pronouns with pronouns such as demonstratives, interrogatives, and relatives and shows that they belong to two distinct categories. Characteristics of the two categories are introduced and examined from a cross-linguistic and functional perspective.

Investigating cross-linguistic variation in the domains of all natural languages, this work views this domain as a cognitive space, the topography of which is the same for all languages. It brings together the research results in a universally applicable model, which can be read as a 'flow-chart' for the encoding of intransitive predications.