An evolutionary approach to the typology of functional expressions
This talk explores a typological puzzle: some functional expressions - e.g., expressions of negation, demonstratives, pro-forms, quantificational and modal expressions - are near-universally present in the languages of the world, whereas others, including definite articles and the traditional inflectional categories of tense, gender, case, and so on – vary drastically in their presence, each type occurring very roughly in between one third and two thirds of human languages only.
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