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The Universal Structure of Categories
About this book
Using data from a variety of languages such as Blackfoot, Halkomelem, and Upper Austrian German, this book explores a range of grammatical categories and constructions, including tense, aspect, subjunctive, case and demonstratives. It presents a new theory of grammatical categories - the Universal Spine Hypothesis - and reinforces generative notions of Universal Grammar while accommodating insights from linguistic typology. In essence, this new theory shows that language-specific categories are built from a small set of universal categories and language-specific units of language. Throughout the book the Universal Spine Hypothesis is compared to two alternative theories - the Universal Base Hypothesis and the No Base Hypothesis. This valuable addition to the field will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in linguistics.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the core languages of investigation
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The universal structure of categories
- 2 A history of ideas behind the spine
- 3 The universal spine as a heuristic for the identification of grammatical categories
- 4 Anchoring categories in independent clauses
- 5 Anchoring categories in dependent clauses
- 6 Nominal anchoring categories
- 7 Categories that introduce a point of view
- 8 Towards a formal typology
- References
- Index