Description

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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.

About the Author

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William Croft, Ph.D. (1986), Stanford University. Professor of Linguistics, University of New Mexico. He has published monographs and many articles on typology, construction grammar, semantics and language change, including Radical Construction Grammar (OUP, 2001) and Verbs: Aspect and Causal Structure (Oxford, 2012).