The Typology of Semantic Alignment
Mark Donohue and Søren Wichmann
Abstract
Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This book presents a collection of new typological examinations and case studies. International typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise o ... More
Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This book presents a collection of new typological examinations and case studies. International typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific — the areas where semantically aligned languages are concentrated.
Keywords:
intransitive predicates,
transitive predicates,
Eurasia,
America,
south-west Pacific,
history of linguistics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199238385 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199238385.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Mark Donohue, editor
Monash University
Author Webpage
Søren Wichmann, editor
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Author Webpage
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