Date: 24-Sep-2008 From: Julia Ulrich <julia.ulrichdegruyter.com> Subject: Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond: Mauri E-mail this message to a friend
Title: Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond
Series Title: Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT] 42
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
Author: Caterina Mauri
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110204391 Pages: 354 Price: Europe EURO 98.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110204391 Pages: 354 Price: U.S. $ 157.00 Comment: For orders placed in North America only.
This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of economic principles with the semantic properties of the individual relations expressed. A fine-grained functional systematization of coordination is proposed and described by means of implicational patterns and semantic maps. This work brings together a broad cross-linguistic perspective and a detailed semantic analysis, largely based on new and comparable data collected by means of questionnaires, all accessible in the appendix of the book. It represents the first systematic attempt towards a unified typology of coordination relations.