Abstract Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal
phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location …

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are
all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the …

The next century will see more than half of the world's 6,000 languages become extinct, and
most of these will disappear without being adequately recorded. Written by one of the …

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent
years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The …

Although the comparative method has been applied to a range of African language families,
these have received little coverage in general textbooks. The present monograph was …

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition,
and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates …

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirana is exceptional in
displaying'inexplicable gaps', that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting …

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five
hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This …

Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative
method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of …