Invariance, Markedness and Distinctive Feature Analysis

This volume provides a new kind of contrastive analysis of two unrelated languages — English and Hebrew — based on the semiotic concepts of invariance, markedness and distinctive feature theory. It concentrates on linguistic forms and constructions which are remarkably different in each language despite the fact that they share the same familiar classifications and labels.Tobin demonstrates how and why traditional and modern syntactic categories such as grammatical number; verb tense, aspect, mo