Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology
ISBN: 9789004363533
Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Religion and sociology;

In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology , William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change. Croft begins from construction grammar, a theory of syntax in which all syntactic structures are a pairing of form and meaning. Constructions are posited as basic; syntactic categories are defined by constructions. The internal structure of constructions directly link elements of constructions to the meanings they express, Constructions across languages can be situated in a space of syntactic variation. Grammar emerges from the verbalization of experience. Constructions occur in a probability distribution across the conceptual space of meanings. These probability distributions evolve, leading to grammatical change in language, modeled in an evolutionary framework.


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