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Article: Global trends in language *.
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- September 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract
A natural assumption in typology is that surveys taken at different periods of history would produce much the same profile. However, there are a number of hypotheses that posit global trends. Givon (1979), for instance, posits a long-term unidirectional change from SOV to SVO. Most SVO languages are clustered in large linguistic areas, so it may be that diffusion is largely responsible for the posited growth in SVO languages. Nichols (1992) interprets the global distribution of certain morphosyntactic features as reflecting large-scale drift, and the distribution of ergativity is suggestive of such a widespread change. But apart from these putative ...
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