Rethinking Universals How Rarities affect Linguistic Theory 1st Edition by Jan Wohlgemuth, Michael Cysouw ISBN 978-3110220926 311022092X

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ISBN 10:   311022092X

ISBN 13: 978-3110220926

Author: Jan Wohlgemuth, Michael Cysouw 

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.

Table of contents: 

1. Michael Cysouw & Jan Wohlgemuth
2. The other end of universals: theory and typology of rara
3. Harald Hammarström
4. Rarities in numeral systems
5. Thomas Hanke
6. Additional rarities in the typology of numerals
7. Alice C. Harris
8. Explaining typologically unusual structures: the role of probability
9. Pavel losad
10. Right at the left edge: initial consonant mutations in the
11. languages of the world
12. Andrei Malchukov
13. “Quirky” case: rare phenomena in case-marking and their implications for a theory of typological distributions
14. Matti Miestamo
15. Negatives without negators
16. Frederick J. Newmeyer
17. Accounting for rare typological features in formal syntax:
18. three strategies and some general remarks
19. Jan Rijkhoff
20. Rara and grammatical theory
21. Søren Wichmann & Eric W. Holman
22. Pairwise comparisons of typological profiles

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Tags: Jan Wohlgemuth, Michael Cysouw, Rethinking Universals, How Rarities