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Description:
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Across North Asia, complex sentence formation patterns display an unusually
high prevalence of suffixed relational morphemes used to convey
subordination. Suffixal subordinators occur in a variety of genetic
groupings, most notably Samoyedic, Turkic, and Tungusic, but also in some
of the region's language isolates, such as Ket and Ainu. No general study
has surveyed complex sentences across Northern Eurasia and the Pacific Rim,
an area noted both for its complicated web of language contact phenomena
and its long-established genetic divisions. The 14 chapters in this volume
survey synthetic and analytic methods of subordination and coordination.
Much of the data reflect original fieldwork, and several chapters focus on
critically endangered languages. Nearly every family or isolate in North
Asia is taken into consideration, as are all major formal and functional
types of complex sentence formation.
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