3 On the Explanation of Typologically Unusual Structures

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that languages are ‘bundles of historical accidents’. It further argues that unusual or rare features are unusual or rare because they are the accidental result of many different circumstances or conditions that have been lined up in just the right way. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 discusses the structure of the argument and compares the explanation with other general approaches. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 describe a very rare structure in Georgian and in Udi, respectively, and show that each may be explained by the approach adopted here. Section 3.5 discusses the Uniformitarian Principle in this context, and Section 3.6 presents some conclusions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 75 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.