Here, Comrie (linguistics, U. of Southern Cal.) is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, re

The discovery of 'linguistic universals' - the properties that all languages have in common - is a fundamental goal of linguistic research. Linguists face the t

Sign languages are of great interest to linguists, because while they are the product of the same brain, their physical transmission differs greatly from that o

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the pro

This book collects the contributions presented at the international congress held at the University of Bologna in January 2007, where leading scholars of differ