Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology written by William Croft and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.