Between Grammar And Lexicon

The essays in this volume explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, calling into question the strict dichotomy between the two that is sometimes assumed.

This volume has its origins in a theme session entitled: “Lexical and Grammatical Classification: Same or Different?” from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. It includes theme session presentations, additional papers from that conference, and several invited contributions. All the articles explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, both illustrating the close interaction, as well as questioning the strict dichotomy, between them. This volume promotes a holistic view of classification reflecting functional, cognitive, communication, and sign-oriented approaches to language which have been applied to both the grammar and the lexicon. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, Number and Gender Systems Across Languages, is further subdivided into three sections: (1) Noun Classification; (2) Number Systems; and (3) Gender Systems. Part II, Verb Systems and Parts of Speech Across Languages, is divided into two sections: (1) Tense and Aspect and (2) Parts of Speech. The analyses represent a diverse range of languages and language families: Bantu (Swahili), Guaykuruan (Pilagá), Indo-European (English, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Spanish) and Semitic (Hebrew).

This volume has its origins in a theme session entitled: “Lexical and Grammatical Classification: Same or Different?” from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. It includes theme session presentations, additional papers from that conference, and several invited contributions. All the articles explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, both illustrating the close interaction, as well as questioning the strict dichotomy, between them. This volume promotes a holistic view of classification reflecting functional, cognitive, communication, and sign-oriented approaches to language which have been applied to both the grammar and the lexicon. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, Number and Gender Systems Across Languages, is further subdivided into three sections: (1) Noun Classification; (2) Number Systems; and (3) Gender Systems. Part II, Verb Systems and Parts of Speech Across Languages, is divided into two sections: (1) Tense and Aspect and (2) Parts of Speech. The analyses represent a diverse range of languages and language families: Bantu (Swahili), Guaykuruan (Pilagá), Indo-European (English, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Spanish) and Semitic (Hebrew).

As a typical interface phenomenon, clitics have become increasingly important in linguistic theory during the last decade. The present book contributes to the recent discussion and first provides a comprehensive overview of clitic sequencing, clitic placement and clitic doubling in the major Romance languages. In addition, new data from a northern Italian dialect are introduced. The author then gives a critical summary of the current morphological analyses of clitic phenomena. She also discusses recent Optimality-theoretical analyses of clitic combinations and clitic placement and shows how these analyses can be improved upon when we also consider a morphological treatment of clitics. This book provides innovative solutions to clitic phenomena within the framework of a constraint-based morphological theory and will be of interest not only to morphologists, syntacticians and those working on the grammar of Romance languages, but also to linguists who are interested in the organisation of the grammar and the lexicon.

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and – mediated through cognition – by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics.

Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

In functional grammar, the lexicon plays a central role. Lexical items form the basic building blocks around which the structure of a clause is built. This book examines 5 aspects of the role of the lexicon in functional grammar.