Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Verbs

Download or read book Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Verbs written by Folke Josephson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume applies a diachronic perspective to the verb and mainly deals with typological change affecting tense, aspect, mood and modality in a variety of Indo-European languages (Latin, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hittite, and Semitic) and the non-Indo-European Turkic, Amerindian and some Australian languages. The analyses of the structural changes and the interchange between the different grammatical categories that cause them which are presented in the chapters of this volume yield astonishing results. The diachronic perspective combined with a comparative approach provides profound knowledge of the typology of the verb and other typological issues and will serve researchers, as well as advanced and beginning of linguistics students in a way that has rarely been encountered before.