Form and function in language research papers in honour of Christian Lehmann (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction / Johannes Helmbrecht [and others] -- A. Onomasiological perspective: from function to form -- A.1. Functional typologies. The continuum of pragmaticity: a sketch / Hansjakob Seiler -- Weighing semantic distinctions in person forms / Dik Bakker and Anna Siewierska -- Spatial reciprocity: between grammar and lexis / Ekkehard König and Claire Moyse-Faurie -- A chapter in marginal possession: on being six(ty) in Europe (and beyond) / Christel Stolz and Thomas Stolz -- A.2. Constraints on the encoding of concepts. Thoughts on (im)perfective imperatives / Johan van der Auwera, Andrej Malchukov, and Ewa Schalley -- Animacy and argument hierarchy in conflict: constraints on object-topicalization in Korean / Yong-Min Shin and Elisabeth Verhoeven -- A.3. Limits of the exponence of functions: zero. Zero and nothing in Jarawara / R.M.W. Dixon -- Clause linkage in a language without coordination: the adjoined clause in Iatmul / Gerd Jendraschek --
- B. Semasiological perspective: from form to function -- B.1. Establishing categories and relations. Once more on linguistic categories / Paolo Ramat -- Questions surrounding the basic notions of the word, lexie, morpheme, and lexeme / Christian Touratier -- Linguistic typology and language theory: the various faces of syntax / Lunella Mereu -- Linking without grammatical relations in Yucatec: alignment, extraction, and control / Jürgen Bohnemeyer -- B.2. Formal typologies. Areal typology of tone-consonant interactions and implosives in Kwa, Kru, and Southern-Mande / Firmin Ahoua -- The internal structure of adpositional phrases / Silvia Luraghi -- On the form of complex predicates: toward demystifying serial verbs / Masayoshi Shibatani -- Conjunctive coordination in Amharic: some typological approaches / Dieter Metzing and Saba Amsalu Teserra -- Linguistic type and complexity: some remarks / Pierluigi Cuzzolin --
- B.3. Discovering function in the identity of form. Constituent questions and argument-focus constructions: some data from the North-Caucasian languages / Nina Sumbatova -- "A lot of grammar with a good portion of lexicon": towards a typology of partitive and pseudo-partitive nominal constructions / Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects. This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address fundamental issues