engleski

Raising Cross-Linguistic Dust: What Can Contrastive Linguistics Do For Typology?

The contribution of contrastive linguistics to language typology is illustrated with the reexamination of Fred R. Eckman's (1977) implicational scale proposed to systematize & explain typological facts about raising in 11 languages. Counterevidence contradicting Eckman's generalization is produced showing idiosyncracies in certain languages & the language-specific nature of some quasi-raising constructions. It is argued that the implementation of contrastive methodology helps in the verification/falsification of putative language universals & parameter-setting. A corpus-based bidirectional approach will make the typology-derived picture less neat & orderly but more realistic. The contrastive approach showed that a whole network of parameters - syntactic, morphological, & semantic - must be taken into account in the study of the crosslinguistic similarities & differences in raising potential.

contrastive linguistics; language typology; raising constructions; language universals

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