Based on Bernard Comrie's much praisedThe World's Major Languages, this is the first guide in paperback to an important language family. The areas covered include Chinese, Japanese and Sino-Tibetan languages.

Part of a linguistic series covering all major world languages, this volume contains essays that describe the languages of Eastern Europe, including Russian, Greek, Serbo-Croat, Czech and Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and other Indo-European, Uralic and Slavonic tongues.

Part of a linguistic series covering all major world languages, this volume contains essays that describe the languages of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, including Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Swahili and Bantu, Yoruba and the Semitic languages.

Turkic languages present particularly rich sources of data for the study of language contact, given the number and diversity of languages with which they have been in contact. Many common, false generalisations are laid bare and the methodology used in evaluating particular instances of language contact can also be used with profit by students of languages other than the Turkic.

Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume...

The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence,...

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of give (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument...