2021/12/06 by Patrik Austin · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · doi:10.1080/03740463.2021.1987685
openalex publication_date 2021/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This paper introduces a semantically and pragmatically oriented typological generalisation, which is named the orientation principle. It entails that the position of connectives, as defined as a single lexical category including adpositions and conjunctions, provides an explanatory principle for a number of harmonic correlations in crosslinguistic data. A reanalysis of the data guided by this insight is proposed as an alternative to processing approaches.