Re: Head-marking languages and adpositions?

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On Friday 20 September 2002 16:22, you wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 12:44:24AM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > Many of these questions are addressed in Johana Nichols' book
> > _Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time_:
> >
> > It's not for the beginner, but it addresses all sorts of statistical
> > correlations in re head-markedness.
>
> Looks interesting, but is expensive and Amazon doesn't have any customer
> reviews on it.  How is it organized?  Is it all just statistics or does
> it have usage examples, too?  (I'm mostly interested in understanding
> what such languages *feel* like... though I guess if I understood the rules
> I could construct my own examples.  But examples are key.)
>
I've got it here -- it's one of the few books that combine statistics and
linguistics that got a grudging 'not too silly, not too many stupid
mistakes' from a friend of Irina and mine -- who writes statistical software
for genetic research (if I understand correctly what she does). For me -- as
a complete layman as regards statistics, her works looks very plausible. But
I can't even build a Bayesian probability function and get it to work
correctly.

However, if you're looking for what those languages 'feel' like, it may not be
the right book. There aren't many examples -- chapter 2 and 4 mainly.

The TOC is: introduction, favored and disfavored grammatical patters,
correlations between types, correleations of structural types with grammatical
categories, diachronic stability: genetic and areal, role of geography:
structural affinities between areas, linguistic diversity: geographical
distriubtion, diversity and linguistic prehistory: conclusions.

- --
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org
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