Languages Across Boundaries: Studies In Memory Of Anna Siewierska

This book is dedicated to Anna Siewierska, who died, far too young, in 2011. It contains 15 contributions by 20 linguists who may be counted among the foremost scholars in the field of linguistic typology. All of these articles discuss a topic that is prominent in Anna's work, whose journal articles and monographs on the passive, on word order, and on the category of person are standard literature in these respective fields. Mindful of Anna's last monograph, Person, the majority of the contributions in this volume discuss free and bound person forms, argument indexing, reference tracking systems, impersonals, and related issues, such as suppletion and incompleteness in person paradigms, the origin of referential systems, dependent versus independent marking, and referential hierarchies. Other topics are grammatical alignment, grammatical voice, ditransitives, and word order. Most of the contributions take a broad, typological perspective. Others give a more in depth treatment, based on data from a specific language, notably Spanish, Russian, Mandinka, and Mohawk. The book contains a complete bibliography of Anna Siewierska's linguistic production.

"In all, the contributions to this volume do much to advance the field of typology. I believe any typologist would be remiss not to have this book on their shelf, especially given its reasonable price. I strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in person or typology, and I suspect that it will soon become an important and much-referenced book in the field."
Malgorzata Cavar, Sara Couture in: Linguist List 26.542