Description

This book is the first comprehensive and encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns (expressions like someone, anything, nowhere ) in the languages of the world. It shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.

Reviews

"Haspelmath has produced a remarkable book. Tightly written...with a price that should give it the wide circulation it deserves. It is difficult to think of any other grammatical item that has been so well documented."--General Linguistics

[series copy] Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory offers a forum for promoting research and analysis that is both typologically and theoretically informed. Each book in the series will focus on a particular topic, providing an overview of the available cross-linguistic data and, at the same time, engaging such key theoretical issues as the boundaries or limitations of different approaches in dealing with typological data.

Product Details

384 pages; 25 b/w figures, 1 map; ISBN13: 978-0-19-823560-6ISBN10: 0-19-823560-7

About the Author(s)