| Popis: |
This chapter provides an introduction to Part III, explaining the motivation of this collection of typological case studies from issues of phonology to syntax and information structuring. Overviews of this kind are an innovation; they have usually not been included in previous handbooks of Uralic languages. While the comparative-historical approach has always played a central role in Uralic studies, synchronic typological, areal, and contrastive studies with a cross-Uralic scope have begun to appear in the last decades of the twentieth century, together with the rise of linguistic typology and recent developments in the documentation of endangered and minority languages. Typological research in recent decades has discovered or (re)defined features, structures, and categories that exist also in Uralic languages, but were not properly recognized and described; alternatively, they were described in different, often idiosyncratic terms. |
