The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World
By Unknown Author.
Description
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages.Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, t...
ISBN(s)
9780226086651
