Date: 19-Dec-2007 From: Julia Ulrich <julia.ulrichdegruyter.com> Subject: On Interpreting Construction Schemas: Delbecque, Cornillie (Eds) E-mail this message to a friend
Title: On Interpreting Construction Schemas
Subtitle: From Action and Motion to Transitivity and Causality
Series Title: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 198
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
Editor: Nicole Delbecque
Editor: Bert Cornillie
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110198652 Pages: 345 Price: Europe EURO 98.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110198652 Pages: 345 Price: U.S. $ 137.00 Comment: for orders placed in North America
This volume addresses the constructional variability with transitive and causative verbs from the point of view of their respective action and motion patterns. Drawing on the theoretical advances registered in cognitive approaches to language (Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar and space semantics), the papers substantiate new interpretations and adduce empirical evidence from various languages to refine or adjust existing analyses of transitivity and causation.
The different contributions all address the crucial question of how concrete and abstract notions of human behavior drive linguistic expressions. Cognitive linguists consider that linguistic competence functions in terms of complex conceptual units: the native speaker knows and manipulates conceptual blocks without paying further attention to their constitutive parts or their internal organization. However, as this volume illustrates, the role of the constitutive parts and their internal organization cannot simply be reduced to zero. A multidimensional approach to construction schemas is at stake. That is, the speaker applies proper embodied subroutines to build a coherent meaning, but the construction schemas are also rooted in the linguistic patterns the speaker and hearer are familiar with.
The volume is primarily intended for scholars working within cognitive-semantic research at large. Given its theoretical and applied character (in the sense of giving empirical evidence for specific problems in the grammar), the volume will also be of great interest to anyone concerned with syntactic processes, construction grammar or with the cognitive structure of discourse. The descriptive and theoretical insights indeed dwell on areas that are currently dealt with in modern linguistics.
Keywords Cognitive Linguistics; Semantics
Readership Scholars and Advanced Students of the Cognitive-Semantic Field, Syntactic Processes, Construction Grammar, the Cognitive Structure of Discourse, Research Libraries
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