Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond(English, Electronic book text, Mauri Caterina)

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Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond(English, Electronic book text, Mauri Caterina) is written by Mauri Caterina and published by De Gruyter. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3110211491 (ISBN 10) and 9783110211498 (ISBN 13).

This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of economic principles with the semantic properties of the individual relations expressed. A fine-grained functional systematization of coordination is proposed and described by means of implicational patterns and semantic maps. This work brings together a broad cross-linguistic perspective and a detailed semantic analysis, largely based on new and comparable data collected by means of questionnaires, all accessible in the appendix of the book. It represents the first systematic attempt towards a unified typology of coordination relations.