Syntactic Gradience: The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its theoretical formalization.

Bas Aarts draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky., and writes clearly on a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition. His book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of language and syntactic theory in departments of (English) linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in Contemporary English, co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997; 2001): Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English, co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis (John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader co-edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); and The Handbook of English Linguistics co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006). With David Denison and Richard Hogg he is a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics.