On Structural Particles in Sinitic Languages: Typology and Diachrony

African languages and linguistic typology

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages

This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological 'complexity' and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages ap...

typology of iranian languages

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Low Vowel Raising in Sinitic Languages: Assimilation, Reduction, or Both?

Many Sinitic languages respect low vowel raising (LVR) whereby the low vowel /a/ is raised to /e/ only when flanked by a palatal glide and a coronal coda. In this article, I show that LVR in Sinitic languages is a genuine process of grammar because low-level phonetic coarticulatory effects alone cannot account for crosslinguistic/dialectal variation. Specifically, my survey reveals that vowel d...

Language Typology and the Comparison of Languages

While comparison of languages presupposes a common framework neutral to the structures of the languages compared and contrasted, the contemporary grammatical terms and concepts have been developed primarily on the basis of Accusative-type European languages. This has created a great deal of confusion in the universals research. Typological studies in recent years have in part been concerned wit...