Change of Paradigms – New Paradoxes


Book Description

In Paradigm and Paradox, Dirk Geeraerts formulated many of the basic tenets that were to form what Cognitive Linguistics is today. Change of Paradigms –New Paradoxes links back to this seminal work, exploring which of the original theories and ideas still stand strong, which new questions have arisen and which ensuing new paradoxes need to be addressed. It thus reveals how Cognitive Linguistics has developed and diversified over the past decades.




Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation


Book Description

New perspectives on how and why syntax varies between and within speakers, focusing on explaining theoretical backgrounds and methods.




Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar


Book Description

This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or loss, node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions, homostructions, constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally, contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical, psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.




Analogy and Contrast in Language


Book Description

Within cognitive and functional approaches to language structure and grammaticality, analogy and contrast represent two fundamental human cognitive capacities, which, up to now, have mostly been examined separately. This volume seeks to bridge that gap and in doing so it brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research in the field. The chapters in this book examine analogy and contrast across a variety of languages (English, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian), for different language phenomena (constructions, lexical semantics, morphology, sentence structure, text organization), and with the use of various methods (corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, experimental methods, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis). This state-of-the-art research presented in the book should be of interest to specialists within Cognitive Linguistics, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, discourse analysis, translation studies, metaphor research, and cross-cultural research.




Competition in Language Change


Book Description

This book addresses one of the most pervasive questions in historical linguistics – why variation becomes stable rather than being eliminated – by revisiting the so far neglected history of the English dative alternation. The alternation between a nominal and a prepositional ditransitive pattern (John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary) emerged in Middle English and is closely connected to broader changes at that time. Accordingly, the main quantitative investigation focuses on ditransitive patterns in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English; in addition, the book employs an Evolutionary Game Theory model. The results are approached from an ‘evolutionary construction grammar’ perspective, combining evolutionary thinking with diachronic constructionist notions, and the alternation’s emergence is interpreted as a story of constructional innovation, competition, cooperation and co-evolution. The book not only provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the history of one of the most-discussed syntactic phenomena in English, but by fusing two frameworks and employing two different methodologies also presents a highly innovative approach to a problem of relevance to historical linguistics in general.




Comparative Variation Analysis


Book Description

Variation studies is an increasingly popular area in linguistics, becoming embedded in curriculum design, conferences, and research. However, the field is at risk of fragmenting into different research communities with different foci. This pioneering book addresses this by establishing a canon of state-of-the-art quantitative methods to analyze grammatical variation from a comparative perspective. It explains how to use these methods to investigate large datasets in a responsible fashion, providing a blueprint for applying techniques from corpus linguistic, variationist, and dialectometric traditions in novel ways. It specifically explores the scope and limits of syntactic variability in a global language such as English, and investigates three grammatical alternations in nine varieties of English, exploring what we can learn about the grammatical choices that people make based on both observational and experimental data. Comprehensive yet accessible, it will be of interest to academic researchers and students of sociolinguistic, corpus linguistics, and World Englishes.




Cognitive Sociolinguistics Revisited


Book Description

Cognitive Sociolinguistics draws on the rich theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and focuses on the social factors that underlie the variability of meaning and conceptualization. In the last decade, the field has expanded in various way. The current volume takes stock of current and emerging advances in the field in short academic contributions. The studies collected in this book have a usage-based approach to language variation and change, drawing on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and are sensitive to social variation, be it cross-linguistic or language-internal. Three types of contributions are collected in this book. First, it contains theoretical overview papers on the domains that have witnessed expansion in recent years. Second, it presents novel research ideas in proof-of-concept contributions, aimed at blue-sky research and out-of-the-box linguistic analyses. Third, it showcases recent empirical studies within the field. By combining these three types of contributions, the book provides an encompassing overview of novel developments in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.




The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity


Book Description

This collection brings together the authors' previous research with new work on the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, offering a unified theoretical account for its further study. The book traces the development of the RF approach from its foundations in two major research strands of linguistics: the study of sociolinguistic variation and the text-linguistic study of register variation. Building on this foundation, the authors demonstrate the RF framework at work across a series of corpus-based research studies focused specifically on grammatical complexity in English. The volume highlights early work exploring patterns of grammatical complexity in present-day spoken and written registers as well as subsequent studies which extend this research to historical patterns of register variation and the application of RF research to the study of writing development for L1 and L2 English university students. Taken together, along with the addition of introductory chapters connecting the different studies, the volume offers readers with a comprehensive resource to better understand the RF approach to grammatical complexity and its implications for future research. The volume will appeal to students and scholars with research interests in either descriptive linguistics or applied linguistics, especially those interested in grammatical complexity and empirical, corpus-based approaches.




Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas


Book Description

Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas focuses on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guaraní, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. This edited volume explores the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, and also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure. Across ten chapters, this book offers a broad survey of bidirectional influence in Spanish contact situations both geographically (in the US Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Andean regions of Ecuador and Peru, and the Southern Cone) and structurally (in the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics). By examining the potential structural effects that two languages have on one another, it provides a novel and more holistic perspective on mutual linguistic influence than that of previous work on language contact. The volume serves as a reference on mutual influence in bilingual language varieties and will be of interest to researchers, scholars and graduate students in Hispanic linguistics, and more broadly in language contact.




The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics


Book Description

The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive, authoritative, and interdisciplinary view of usage-based theory in linguistics. Contributions by an international team of established and emerging scholars discuss the application of used-based approaches in phonology, morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, language variation and change, language development, cognitive linguistics, and other subfields of linguistics. Unprecedented in depth and scope, this groundbreaking work of scholarship addresses all major theoretical and methodological aspects of usage-based linguistics while offering diverse perspectives and key insights into theory, history, and methodology. Throughout the text, in-depth essays explore up-to-date methodologies, emerging approaches, new technologies, and cutting-edge research in usage-based linguistics in many languages and subdisciplines. Topics include used-based approaches to subfields such as anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, statistical analysis, and corpus linguistics. Covering the conceptual foundations, historical development, and future directions of usage-based theory, The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics is a must-have reference work for advanced students and scholars in anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpora analysis, and other subfields of linguistics.