This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages
to express predicative possession, as in" the boy has a bat". It presents the results of the …

This book presents the first systematic typological analysis of applicatives across African,
American Indian, and East Asian languages. It is also the first to address their functions in …

As traditionally understood, universals of language are cross-linguistic generalizations
concerning synchronic grammars, and their explanations usually appeal to functional …

The discovery of'linguistic universals'-the properties that all languages have in common-is a
fundamental goal of linguistic research. Linguists face the task of accounting for why …

In situations of language contact not involving substrate interference, it is a typological
commonplace that the borrowing of grammatical properties (such as word order patterns …