The World Atlas Of Language Structures

Martin Haspelmath is Senior Scientist at the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an Honorary Professor at the University of Leipzig. After studies in Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo, and Moscow, he received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in 1993. Before moving to Leipzig in 1998, he held teaching positions in Berlin, Bamberg, and Pavia, and he has taught at summer schools in Albuquerque, Mainz, Düsseldorf, Cagliari and at MIT. His research interests are in comparative, diachronic, and theoretical morphology and syntax. He is the author of A Grammar of Lezgian (1993), Indefinite Pronouns (1997), and Understanding Morphology (2002) and co-editor of Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook (2 vols, 2001). Matthew S. Dryer received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Michigan. After ten years at the University of Alberta, he came to the University at Buffalo in 1989 where he is Professor of Linguistics. He has held visiting positions at UCLA, the University of Oregon, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His primary research interest is in typology and syntax. Since 1983 he has been working on a project establishing a large cross-linguistic database on word order and related typological characteristics. His other research interests include discourse, pragmatics, American Indian languages (particularly Kutenai), and Papuan languages. Since 2001 he has been engaged in joint field research with Lea Brown on two languages of Papua New Guinea, Walman (in the Torricelli family) and Poko-Rawo (in the Sko family). David Gil has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology since 1998. He graduated from UCLA in 1982 and held positions at the University of Washington, the University of Tel Aviv, the University of Haifa, the National University of