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Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these...

Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting Edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics contains specially-selected papers introducing new, quantitative methodologies for understanding language interaction and evolution. It draws upon data from the phonologies, morphologies, numeral systems, constituent orders, case systems, and lexicons of the world's languages, bringing large datasets and sophisticated statistical techniques to bear on fundamental questions such as: how to identify and account for areal distributions, when language contact leads to grammatical simplification,...

Quantitative methods in linguistics, which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s, have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists, but also statisticians, physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale, providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of...

Classification is a popular topic in typological, descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This volume is the first to deal specifically with the diachrony of linguistic systems of classification. It comprises original papers that examine the ways in which linguistic classification systems arise, change, and dissipate in both natural circumstances and in circumstances of attrition. The role of diffusion in such processes is explored, as well as the question of what can be diffused. The volume is not restricted to nominal systems of classification, but also includes papers dealing with the...