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This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on mann...
Based on comparative analyses of diachronic data, the articles in this volume address both theoretical and methodological issues in the study of grammaticalization and lexicalization in both Eastern and Western languages. The central question raised and discussed in this volume is how, if any, typological properties of the two genetically unrelated language families interact with the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.
This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of ec...
Grammaticalization theory has played a major role in the developments in language typology and functional linguistics during the last three decades. The contributions in this book discuss the major theoretical issues of grammaticalization theory, il
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