蜜糖直播 Linguistics professor Zygmunt Frajzyngier has published a new work on linguistic theory and description with 蜜糖直播 Adjunct Assistant Professor Erin Shay. The work, published by John Benjamins, is entitled聽The Role of Functions in Syntax: A Unified Approach to Language Theory, Description, and Typology.聽The book addresses a fundamental question in linguistics: why languages are similar and why they are different. The study聽proposes that languages are fundamentally similar when they encode the same meanings in their grammatical systems and that languages are different when they encode聽different meanings. Even if languages encode the same meaning, they may differ with respect to the formal means used to code those meanings. This approach allows for聽a typology based on functional domains, subdomains and functions coded in individual languages. The outcome of the study is a unified approach to language theory,聽linguistic typology, and descriptive linguistics. The argumentation for the hypotheses and the proposed approach is supported by analyses of data from more than a dozen languages, including English, Polish,聽French, Wandala, Mina, Hdi, and several other Chadic languages. The study is accessible to a wide variety of linguists.