This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of'flexible words', ie words that cannot be
classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb …

Case-systems all over the world exhibit striking similarities. In most lan-guages intransitive
subjects (S) receives less overt marking than one of the two transitive arguments (agent-like …

In this dissertation I study language complexity from a typological perspective. Since the
structuralist era, it has been assumed that local complexity differences in languages are …

This article examines the roles of language universals; but first, a few words on what is
meant by 'language universal'and by 'explanation'are given. It starts by addressing how …

The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the existence of a semantic structure encoded
in the grammatical system of a language, to describe its organization and its components …

The study addresses the functional distinction between the annexed and absolute states of
nouns, a controversial issue in Berber linguistics. It is demonstrated that the annexed state …

The study proposes that in some languages, there exists a principle according to which
indirect rather than direct means of expression are used whenever the goals of speech …

In this paper I propose, building on an earlier work by Xrakovskij (Grammaticeskie kategorii
glagola: opyt teorii vzaimodejstvija, Nauka, 1996) and Aikhenvald and Dixon (Language 74 …

This dissertation is a semantically oriented study of the functions of dative case, defined here
as a dependent marking strategy that is the prototypical exponent of the recipient in a …

It has often been argued that languages with no morphological marking of core arguments
(referred to here as zero-marking languages) should prefer SVO word order. This correlation …