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

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

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

This volume consists of papers presented at the Conference on Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition, University of Southern California, February 1

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