Language Universals—With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies

Greenberg’s Language Universals is typical of his typological-theoretical work in its stunning originality. Starting out from the observations underlying Praguian markedness, Greenberg contributes a mass of new data and generalizations and lays the foundations for a post-structuralist, usage-based theory of grammatical asymmetries. This work will continue to be influential for many years to come.

"Joseph H. Greenberg was one of the most original and influential linguists of the twentieth century. He died at his home in Stanford, California, in May2001.Joseph H. Greenberg was a major pioneer in the development of linguistics as an empirical science. His work was always founded directly on quantitative data from a single language or from a wide range of languages. His chief legacy to contemporary linguistics is in the development of an approach to the study of language - typology and univerals - and to historical linguistics. Yet he also made major contributions to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, and especially African language studies." From an obituary by William Croft, University of Manchester, England.

Martin Haspelmath is Professor of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, Leipzig, Germany.