Adopting an approach to the subject pioneered by Greenberg and others, Professor Comrie is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals. The book has chapters on word order, case marking, relative clauses and causative contruction and is informed throughout by the conviction that an explanatory account of universal properties of human language cannot restrict itself to purely formal aspects. It must also take account of language use and relate formal properties to testable claims about cognition and cognitive development. This new edition has been revised to take account of new research in universals and typology in the past decade and applies its findings to the problems of generative grammatical theory.