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Description:
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Whereas Africa as a typological area is often associated with extensive
verb morphology and verb serialization, this collection of studies shows
that there is tremendous typological diversity at the clausal level. Verb
serialization in the Khoisan area contrasts with extensive case-marking in
languages of northeastern Africa, which also use converbs and light verb
plus coverb constructions. Although the categorial distinction between
nouns and verbs is generally clear in African languages, a number of them
nevertheless provide intricate analytical challenges in this respect.
Whereas some languages are strongly head marking at the clausal level,
others manifest an interesting mixture of alternative strategies for the
coding of participants. The analysis of information packaging, and related
issues such as split ergativity, Differential Object Marking, and
discourse-configurational properties also play a role in several
contributions. The collection contains not only innovative analyses for the
respective language families these languages belong to, but also material
relevant for the current debate in theoretical linguistics concerning
lexical specification as against construction-based approaches towards
argument structure.
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