ENGLISH

Rethinking Universals: How Rarities affect Linguistic Theory

By Michael Cysouw , Jan Wohlgemuth

Book information

Publisher
Mouton de Gruyter
Year
2010
ISBN
311022092X, 9783110220926
LCC
P204 .R48 2010
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (1638873 bytes)
Series
Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 45
Edition
1
Pages
288\299
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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 capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. Explaining the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other, is a reasonable and interesting challenge to any theory of how human language works. The present volume for the first time compiles selected papers on the study of rare linguistic features from various fields of linguistics and from a wide range of languages.

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