Publisher's Synopsis
More and more linguists acknowledge the cardinal importance of good descriptive grammar, especially when it satisfies the criterion of comparability across languages. Pioneering in this respect was the Lingua Descriptive Studies questionnaire devised by Comrie and Smith (1977). The first four articles in this volume outline a general structural framework for descriptive grammars based on a systematic elaboration of this approach. The second group of articles discuss problems of grammatical description involved in selected areas such as topicalization in sentences, noun-verb distinction, semantic roles and verb complexes with respect to their general comparability.
