The book introduces the concept of asymmetric events, an important concept in language and cognition, which, for the first time in linguistic literature, is identified in a more systematic way and analyzed in a number of different languages, including typologically or genetically unrelated ones. Asymmetric events are two or more events of unequal status in an utterance and papers in the volume present ways in which a linguistic description of main events in a sentence is different (morphologically, syntactically, discursively) from a description of backgrounded events. The prototypical asymmetries involving perception, cognition, and language are identified in subordination, nominalization and modification of various kinds but they extend to coordinate structures, serial verbs, spatial language and viewing arrangement, as well as part - whole relations. The perspective is broadly cognitive and functional, the authors use different though complementing methodologies, some include corpus data, and the asymmetries are shown to have a variety of stylistic and ideological implications.

An in-depth analysis of manifold asymmetries in structure and function of diverse languages makes this volume of interest to linguists of different persuasion, philosophers, cognitive researchers, discourse analysts and students of language and cognition.

“The book is an important contribution in the recent trend of cross-linguistically and typologically-driven syntactic research and presents a cognitive-functional perspective on an abstract structural domain, subordination, that has generally been the target of more formally-driven, language-specific inquiry. The articles in the book, including work by some of the leading scholars in the field, argue convincingly for the cognitive underpinnings of some of the most abstract morphosyntactic phenomena in natural language, and shows how taking this approach provides insights not only into the structure of a wide range of grammatical systems, but also into the way human beings conceptualize events and encode these conceptualizations for the purposes of communication.”——David Beck, University of Alberta, Canada