Publisher's Synopsis
Since its first publication Language Universals and Linguistic Typology has become established as the leading introductory account of one of the most productive areas of linguistics – the analysis, comparison and classification of the common features and forms of the organization of languages. Adopting an approach to the subject pioneered by Greenberg and others, Professor Comrie is particularly concerned with syntactico–semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, relative clauses and causative constructions. His book is informed throughout by the conviction that an explanatory account of universal properties of human language cannot restrict itself to purely formal aspects. This new edition has been revised to take full account of new research in universals and typology in the past decade and more generally to consider how the approach advocated relates to recent advances in generative grammatical theory.
