Stassen makes a major contribution to the study of language typology with Intransitive Predication. Basing his analysis on a sample of 410 languages, he presents a universally applicable model for defining the domain of intransitive predication in natural languages. Intransitive predicates are defined in terms of four domains: events (Sarah is walking), classes (Sarah is a secretary), properties (Sarah is tall), and locations (Sarah is in the garden).

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat." It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of which lack a...