Nikolas Gisborne

The Event Structure of Perception Verbs

Graeme Trousdale

This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.

Constructional Approaches to English Grammar

Andrew Hippisley

Chapters in this volume describe morphology using four different frameworks that have an architectural property in common: they all use defaults as a way of discovering and presenting systematicity in the least systematic component of grammar. These frameworks - Construction Morphology, Network Morphology, Paradigm-function Morphology, and Word Grammar - display key differences in how they constrain the use and scope of defaults, and in the morphological phenomena that they address. An introductory chapter presents an overview of defaults in linguistics and specifically in morphology. In subsequent chapters, key proponents of the four frameworks seek to answer questions about the role of defaults in the lexicon, including: Does a defaults-based account of language have implications for the architecture of the grammar, particularly the proposal that morphology is an autonomous component? How does a default differ from the canonical or prototypical in morphology? Do defaults have a psychological basis? And how do defaults help us understand language as a sign-based system that is flawed, where the one to one association of form and meaning breaks down in the morphology?

Nikolas Gisborne

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