This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of

The studies in this book represent the rich, diverse and substantial research being conducted today in the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. The chapters cover a broad scope. Several studies address questions of language relatedness, often challenging conventional assumptions about the status of language contact as an explanatory factor in

This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

This important new study examines in detail a semantic-pragmatic pattern surrounding the basic verb 'acquire' in nearly 30 Southeast Asian languages, concentrating on Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer, Kmhmu, Hmong, and varieties of Chinese. The book makes a significant contribution to empirical work on semantic and grammatical change in a linguistic area,