Description

The volume is divided into four sections: typology, syntax, discourse and phonology. Two of the typology papers study the structure and organization of category systems (); the third discusses language typology and universals from the perspective of language acquisition ().The eight papers in the syntax section are of three types. and discuss 'general' issues of linguistic theory/domain. Four papers () address specific analyses and their implications from language-particular and theoretical perspectives. The papers by and Thomas Rindflesch relate theoretical concepts and analyses to natural language processing.In the section on discourse, the contributions by and deal with interpersonal conflict; discusses the selection between direct and indirect speech forms. and consider ways in which choices among, or variation in, some grammatical and semantic categories may be explainable on pragmatic and discourse grounds.The phonology papers are focused on two major themes: underspecification and borrowing. Four of the articles address the issue of underspecification in phonological representations (). In the other two papers questions of borrowing are discussed, in contribution from a synchronic perspective, and in paper from a historical one.The volume is completed by a subject index and a language index.