Word Order in Discourse: 30 (Typological Studies in Language) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9027229228 ISBN 13: 9789027229229

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 1995

Synopsis

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

About this title

Synopsis

This volume is a collection of 18 papers on the problem of word-order variation in discourse. It demonstrates that word-order discourse is not random, but rather is governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages. These papers discuss word-order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text-based studies. Several papers address the problem of deciding which order is "basic" among the alternatives. The volume should be of interest to typologists, other linguists and those interested in discourse syntax.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027229228
• ISBN 13: 9789027229229
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 605
• Editor: Downing Pamela A., Noonan Michael