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Overview
Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning--that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence.Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations.
Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.
Synopsis
Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence.
Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations.
Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.
Booknews
A study of basic sentence types--the "simple sentences" of traditional grammarians--growing out of the author's Ph.D. thesis (U. of California, Berkeley, 1992). A central thesis of the work is that basic sentences of English are instances of constructions--form-meaning correspondences that exist independently of particular verbs. That is, it is argued that constructions themselves carry meaning, independently of the words in the sentence. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)