I have mostly been engaged in typological (cross-linguistic) research and have primarily worked with morphological and syntactic problems. I have devoted quite a few years to the study of nominalizations (action nominals and the like) ? first in a global 96 language sample (1993) and later in a large European sample (forthc.c). The results of these studies have confirmed that the most common parts of speech, the noun and the verb, are not always clearly delimited from each other, and have raized my curiosity about other mixed categories, such as nouns in attributive functions showing adjective-like properties ("R" 1994, 1995, forthc.b, forthc.e) or nouns used as quantifiers showing numeral-like properties (forthc.d). Nominalizations have also served as an entrance to the study of adnominal possession across languages, from various points of view (morphosyntax, semantics and possible correlations between the two) ?I have written a number of papers on these topics and am currently working with a large data base on adnominal possessive constructions across languages. As is well known, "possession" in linguistics often applies to relations which hardly have anything to do with "possession", say, in the legal or everyday sense. Linguists make, for instance, an important distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, where kinterms and names for body parts (typically inalienables) often build other types of possessive constructions than words for artefacts and other concrete objects. At a closer look this distinction turns out to be far from self evident and can often find an explanation in historical developments (such as grammaticalisation, cf. 1997, 1998); in addition, kinterms show other interesting properties and deserve deeper studies of their own (cf. Dahl & K-T forthc.).
Areal typology has been an important direction in my research during the recent 10 years. During the period of 1990 - 1995 I was a permanent member of the "Noun Phrase Structure"-group withing the programme EUROTYP (European Science Foundation). During 1991 - 1998 I was responsible for the programme "Language typology around the Baltic Sea" (the Faculty of Humanities, Stockholm university). My strive has been to combine a macroperspective, or a "bird view", a panoramic view of linguistic phenomena, typical of linguistic typology, and a microperspective, a much more detailed and nuanced view, much in the spirit of dialectology, linguistic geography, areal (contact) linguistics, traditional historical linguistics and studies of particular languages. This has turned out to be a much more complicated enterprise than I could ever have imagined, but has also led to numerous interesting discoveries, both concrete ones and also of a greater theoretical value. Large-scale typology is often accused for being too superficial, oversimplifying and rudely generalizing, whereas the opposite type of research makes sometimes a boring impression with its preoccupation with details and, not rarely, a more or less complete absence of any theoretical generalizations. The difficult thing is to find a balance between the two directions of research, a level on which the details can be interpreted as leading to interesting generalizations. It is my hope that some of my works (forthc. a, forthc. d., "S" u.u. and, most importantly, K-T & Wälchli forthc. ) can satisfy these requirements, at least to a certain degree. In particular, the last mentioned work shows an innovative approach to the study of areal phenomena in general and is, hopefully, an important contribution to the study of circum-Baltic languages.
I have also writen papers on other grammatical
phenomena in various languages, such as tense, and causatives and incorporation
(1993). Two of my papers are devoted to completely different topics ? a
review of the translation theory in the Soviet Union (1989) and a contrastive
semantic (and lexicographic) analysis of temperature words (adjectives)
in Russian and Swedish ("R" 1999).
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