Universals and Rarities Debunked - Einzelansicht

Die Veranstaltung findet teils vor Ort und teils online statt.

The main aim of this course is to uncover what is common ('universal') and what is rare in the languages of the world, and principles that might explain the distribution of such common and rare characteristics. We focus mostly on various (morpho-)syntactic phenomena such as word order, word classes, pronoun usage, tense/aspect, numeral systems and color terms. We ask what the limits to linguistic variability are, while at the same time developing a sense for peculiarities of the western European languages we are familiar with.