Typology of heavy and light again or the eternal return of the same

This paper investigates the expression of preceded events in a sample of 100 languages from all continents in parallel texts. A distinction is made between heavy ‘again’ expressions (such as English again; emphatic, occurring in all languages) and light ‘again’ expressions (such as English re-; non-emphatic, occurring only in some languages). Light ‘again’ expressions develop at least partly from heavy ‘again’ expressions by means of rhetorical devaluation and are generally found to show lexical collocations with specific verbs, even if their degree of lexicalization strongly varies cross-linguistically.