Commands: A Cross-Linguistic Typology

This book focuses on the form and the function of commands--directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders--from a typological perspective. A team of internationally-renowned experts in the field examine the interrelationship of these speech acts with cultural stereotypes and practices, as well as their origins and development, especially in the light of language contact.

The volume begins with an introduction outlining the marking and the meaning of imperatives and other ways of expressing commands and directives. Each of the chapters that follow offers an in-depth analysis of commands in a particular language. These analyses are cast in terms of ’basic linguistic theory’--a cumulative typological functional framework--and the chapters are arranged and structured in a way that allows useful comparison between them. The languages investigated include Quechua, Japanese, Lao, Aguaruna and Ashaninka Satipo (both from Peru), Dyirbal (from Australia), Zenzontepec Chatino (from Mexico), Nungon, Tayatuk, and Karawari (from Papua New Guinea), Korowai (from West Papua), Wolaitta (from Ethiopia), and Northern Paiute (a native language of the United States).

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003) and The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008; paperback 2010), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American and Papuan languages and typological issues including evidentials, classifiers, and serial verbs. Her other recent publications with OUP include Languages of the Amazon (2012; paperback 2015), The Art of Grammar (2014), and How Gender Shapes the World (2016). She is co-editor, with R. M. W. Dixon, of The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (CUP, 2017), and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (OUP, 2018).

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidin) and a comprehensive historical/typological account Australian Languages: TheirNature and Development (CUP, 2002). He is also the author of A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP, 2004; paperback 2011), and A New Approach to English Grammar (OUP, 2005). His other OUP publications include the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (2010-12), Making New Words (2014), Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (2015) and Are Some Languages Better than Others? (2016). His academic biography, I am a Linguist, was published by Brill in 2011.