{"product_id":"9789027212399","title":"The Story of Zero","description":"The zero coding of referents or other clausal constituents is one of the most natural, communicatively and cognitively-transparent grammatical devices in human language. Together with its functional equivalent, obligatory pronominal agreement, zero is both extremely widespread cross-linguistically and highly frequent in natural text. In the domain of reference, zero represents, somewhat paradoxically, either anaphorically-governed high continuity or cataphorically-governed low topicality. And whether in conjoined\/chained or syntactically-subordinate clauses, zero is extremely well-governed, at a level approaching 100% in natural text. The naturalness, cross-language ubiquity and well-governedness of zero have been largely obscured by an approach that, for 30-odd years, has considered it a typological exotica, the so-called \"pro-drop\" associated with a dubious \"non-configurational\" language type. The main aim of this book is to reaffirm the naturalness, universality and well-governedness of zero by studying it from four closely related perspectives: (i) cognitive and communicative function; (ii) natural-text distribution; (iii) cross-language typological distribution; and (iv) the diachronic rise of referent coding devices. The latter is particularly central to our understanding the functional interplay between zero anaphora, pronominal agreement and related referent-coding devices.","brand":"John Benjamins Publishing Company","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47038382342384,"sku":"9789027212399","price":149.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9789027212399_p0.jpg?v=1763669829","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9789027212399","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}