This book provides a description and analysis of a phenomenon that appears to be unique among languages that have been brought to the attention of linguists, namely the possibility of small words occurring inside other words. Examination of this is important because it helps us to understand what a word is from a cross-linguistic point of view. The second part of the book shows how Udi came to be so different from other languages, and how in this sense it explains the phenomenon.

In this important new work, Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of syntactic change. Using a cross-linguistic approach, they reveal shared properties of changes across languages, determine what mechanisms lie behind them, and how they correlate to the overall explanation of syntactic change. They draw on data drawn from a wide variety of languages, in particluar those from the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, and North East Caucasian families.

This book provides one of the best and most thorough studies available in English of the syntax of a non-Indo-European language.

Multiple (or extended) exponence is the occurrence of multiple realizations of a single morphosemantic feature, bundle of features, or derivational category within a word. This book provides data and direction to the discussion of ME, which has gone in a variety of directions and suffers from lack of evidence. Alice Harris addresses the question of why ME is of interest to linguists and traces the discussion of this concept in the linguistic literature. The four most commonly encountered types of ME are characterized, with copious examples from a broad variety of languages; these types form...