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)