On comitatives and related categories

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This book presents a comprehensive crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories like the instrumental, drawing on data from 400 languages worldwide. The authors explore and revise various linguistic hypotheses regarding the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. They categorize languages into three types based on the morphological treatment of comitatives and their association with other concepts. The study reveals that the structural behavior of comitatives is influenced by geographical factors, with European languages showing notable divergence from global trends, impacting the definition of the comitative. The relationship between comitatives and instrumentals is examined, introducing a semantic map of the comitative, where markedness plays a crucial role. A separate chapter delves into the diachrony of comitatives through grammaticalization research. Empirical data supports the arguments throughout the text, which includes case studies on Icelandic, Latvian, and Maltese, each representing one of the identified language types. Additionally, a chapter analyzes a large parallel literary corpus of 64 languages, illustrating the complex interplay of genetic affiliation, areal location, and typological classification in predicting comitative usage. Quantitative typology methods are utilized to assess similarities among European languages. This work is a significant contribution for general linguists, fu