Copulas (in English, the verb to be) are conventionally defined functionally as a means of relating elements of clause structure, especially subject and complement, and considered to be semantically empty or meaningless. Pustet presents an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 160 languages drawn from the language families of the world. She shows that some languages have a single copula, others several, and some none at all. She links the distribution of copulas to variations in lexical categorization and syntactic structure. She advances a comprehensive theory of copularization which...

This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of the auxiliary verb construction. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and presents his results within a new typological framework. He reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution.

Understanding any communication depends on the listener or reader recognizing that some words refer to what has already been said or written (his, its, he, there, etc.). This mode of reference, anaphora, involves complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people usually perform unerringly, but which present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension is achieved.
Yan Huang provides an extensive and accessible overview of the major contemporary issues surrounding anaphora and gives a critical survey of the many and...

On the basis of a cross-linguistic study of more than 250 languages, this book brings to light several fascinating characteristics of pronouns. Dr Bhat argues that these words do not form a single category, but rather two different categories called 'personal pronouns' and 'proforms'. He points out several differences between the two, such as the occurrence of a dual structure among proforms but not among personal pronouns. These differences are shown to derive from the distinct functions that the two categories have to perform in language.
The book also shows that the so-called...