Wulf Oesterreicher

Peter Koch

This standard introduction to the spoken romance languages, which has long been out of print, is now being released in an up-to-date and revised new edition. The topic “spoken language” has developed into one of the most interesting fields of research – and not only in linguistics. From linguistic theory-based preliminary observations on speech and writing to the topic of language variation, the objective of this book is to present the most significant problems of spoken language, in contrast to written language, for the three major romance languages. The main chapters of this work focus, on the one hand, on the universal characteristics of the spoken word, in particular the textual-pragmatic, syntactic and semantic phenomena. On the other hand, the special features of each of the spoken varieties of French, Italian and Spanish are taken into consideration. This is initially approached from a diachronic (historical) linguistic perspective; the focus here is on the development of individual linguistic spatial variety. This is followed by an exact synchronic description of the characteristics of the individual linguistic varieties at the phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical levels. All linguistic phenomena of today’s synchrony are interpreted on the basis of original corpus material. This work regards itself as a contribution to variety linguistics focused on speech and writing.

Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch

Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania

Martin Haspelmath

Wolfgang Raible

Ekkehard König

This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our current insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters on the patterns and limits of variation manifested by analogous structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (e.g. word order, tense and aspect, inflection, color terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The authors of the individual sections and chapters are for the most part internationally known experts on the relevant topics. The vast majority of the articles are written in English, some in French or German. The handbook is not only intended for the expert in the fields of typology and language universals, but for all of those interested in linguistics. It is specifically addressed to all those who specialize in individual languages, providing basic orientation for their analysis and placing each language within the space of what is possible and common in the languages of the world.

Wulf Oesterreicher

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