Indefinite PronounsOUP Oxford, 8 févr. 2001 - 380 pages This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Most of the world's languages have indefinite pronouns, that is, expressions such as 'someone', 'anything', and 'nowhere'. Martin Haspelmath presents the first comprehensive and encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world, mapping out the range of variation in their functional and formal properties. He shows that cross-linguistic diversity is severely constrained by a set of implicational universals and by a number of unrestricted universals. The author treats his subject matter broadly within the Humboldt-Greenberg tradition of language typology, but also considers the contribution of other theoretical approaches to an understanding of the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns. The book is organized into four logically ordered steps: selection of a part of grammar-indefinite pronouns-that can be identified across languages by formal and functional criteria; investigation of the properties of indefinite pronouns in a world-wide sample of forty languages; formulation of generalizations that emerge from the data, summarized in the form of an implicational map; and theoretically-informed explanations of the generalizations, which go beyond system-internal statements, appealing to cognitive semantics, functional pressures, and universals of language change (especially grammaticalization). |
Table des matières
1 | |
7 | |
3 Formal and Functional Types of Indefinite Pronoun | 21 |
4 An Implicational Map for Indefinite Pronoun Functions | 58 |
5 Theoretical Approaches to the Functions of Indefinite Pronouns | 87 |
6 The Grammaticalization of Indefinite Pronouns | 129 |
7 Further Sources of Indefinite Pronouns | 157 |
8 Negative Indefinite Pronouns | 193 |
9 Conclusions | 235 |
Appendices | 244 |
334 | |
355 | |
358 | |
362 | |
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Expressions et termes fréquents
100-language sample co-occurs with verbal comparative free-choice comparative function concessive conditional clauses conditional comparative contexts cross-linguistic diachronic direct direct-negation function distribution English example existential expressions free-choice function free-choice indefinites French German grammatical grammaticalization implicational hierarchy implicational map implicature INDEF INDEF-who indefinite pronouns indefinite series indefiniteness marker indirect negation interrogative pronouns irrealis known unknown irrealis non-specific Kannada known unknown non-specific languages Latin Lezgian linguistic Lithuanian meaning Modern Greek Nanay negation question negative indefinites negative polarity items negative pronouns non-emphatic non-negative non-specific conditional nouns NV-NI Old Church Slavonic Ossetic possible pragmatic scale Progovac Q-sf question indirect negation question/conditional questions and conditionals reduplicated Russian scalar focus particles semantic sentence Serbian/Croatian series is shown series of indefinite shown in Fig someone source construction SOV GN specific irrealis known specific known specific specific irrealis suffix syntactic thing three series typological universal quantifiers verb verbal negation what-INDEF who-INDEF