Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar

ISBN-13: 9780198299820 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 384 str.

John R. Taylor

Opis

John Taylor proposes a unitary account of the possessive morpheme. He takes as his theoretical framework Cognitive Grammar, as developed over the past 15 years by Ronald Langacker and others. In the earlier chapters of the book he introduces and motivates the conceptual apparatus of the theory, and in later chapters he develops a coherent account of the full range of possessive constructions in English.
A special feature of the book is that it offers wide-ranging critique of both traditional and more recent accounts of possessive expressions. Focusing particularly on Government and Binding theory, the author highlights the profound conceptual differences underlying the two theoretical approaches represented by GB and Cognitive Grammar, while also observing some points of convergence between them.

Recenzje

Few topics in English linguistics match the possessive in richness of construction types, token frequency, and the lenge for both a syntactician and a semanticist. Yet, apart from a number of recent dissertations and a monograph or two, this may be the first full-bore, book-length treatment of the English possessive, which makes Taylor's book a welcome addition to the growing body of literature approaching the syntax-semantics interface . . . it is an excellent starting point, and one which can lead us further into a much-desired convergence of theoretical frameworks.

O autorze

John R. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Otago. He is the author of Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (OUP 1989; second edition 1995), and editor (with R. MacLaury) of Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (Mouton de Gruyter 1995).