Original scientific paper

Raising cross-linguistic dust: What can contrastive linguistics do for typology?

Mario Brdar ; Pedagoški fakultet, Osijek

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the relationship between typology and contrastive linguistics.
Some less obvious benefits that this close encounter may have for typology are demonstrated
by taking a closer look at so-called raising constructions. The usefulness of contrastive
methodology in the verification or falsification of putative language universals and parameter
-setting is exemplified on an earlier typological attempt by Eckman (1977) to generalize
raising facts by means of an implicational scale. It is argued that the scale is untenable
the way it was originally formulated. It has also been shown that a corpus-based bidirectional
approach may make the picture that typology presents less neat and orderly but
more realistic. Some issues bound to be uncovered by a contrastive approach, such as the
importance of finiteness-non-finitness cline and productivity of syntactic constructions, together
with attendant morphological and semantic factors such as morphological coding system,
word order, predicate-argument structure, etc., are claimed to be essential ingredients
of an alternative way of looking at the cross-linguistic differences and similarities in raising
potential.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

23942

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/23942

Publication date:

3.6.1996.

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