A semantic and pragmatic explanation of harmony

Abstract

This paper introduces a semantically and pragmatically oriented typological generalisation, which is named the orientation principle. It entails that the position of connectives, as defined as a single lexical category including adpositions and conjunctions, provides an explanatory principle for a number of harmonic correlations in crosslinguistic data. A reanalysis of the data guided by this insight is proposed as an alternative to processing approaches.