Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And even when they did, they mostly just noted peculiar facts as ''quirks'' or ''unusual behavior'', without making too much of an effort at explaining them beyond calling them ''exceptions'' to various rules or generalizations.

Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the...

The papers in this book describe and analyze rara in individuallanguages, covering an extraordinarily broad geographic distribution, including papers about languages from all over the globe. Therange of theoretical subjects discussed shows an enormous breadth, ranging from phonology through word formation, lexical semantics tosyntax and even some sociolinguistics.