Abstract
This article offers a new, transparent method to construe morphosyntactic categories for crosslinguistic research. It avoids the problem of categorial confusion attested in major post-Greenbergian studies in morphosyntactic typology, in particular in probabilistic typological investigations, which tend to mix up semantic and formal criteria and marginalize “statistically insignificant” morphosyntactic variants. These and other problems are avoided by using functional criteria as the starting point in identifying comparable forms and constructions in different languages. Subsequently formal and semantic criteria are employed to arrive at a morphosyntactic category whose members are sufficiently similar in terms of function, form, and meaning.
Abbreviations
- 1/3
1st/3rd person
- acc
accusative
- art
article
- dec
declarative
- dir
direct
- erg
ergative
- gen
genitive
- int
interrogative
- inv
inverse
- nc1
noun class 1
- nc7
noun class 7
- pp1
class 1 pronominal prefix
- refl
reflexive
- rel
relative clause
- s
subject
- sg
singular.
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