Description: Established in the early 1980s, Word Grammar is the first theory of grammar that was cast in the terms of cognitive linguistics. This book surveys the groundbreaking contribution of WG to a number of disciplines both within and outside of linguistics. It illustrates the benefits of thinking beyond traditional phrase-structural notions of syntax, and beyond encapsulated theories of cognition, by exploring how key problems in theoretical linguistics and historical linguistics can be approached from alternative perspectives. It provides examples of how theoretical linguistic notions and constructs of WG can be applied to bilingual language use, as well as a variety of typologically different languages including English, Chinese, German and Swedish. It also explores the relationship between language and social cognition and dependency distance as a universal measure of syntactic complexity. It is essential reading for linguists seeking creative ideas on how to advance explanations of language, language variation and change.
Brief description: Nikolas Gisborne is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Notable publications include The Event Structure of Perception Verbs (OUP, 2010) and Ten Lectures on Events in a Network Theory of Language (Brill, 2020).
Review Quotes: 'This book, celebrating Dick Hudson's 80th birthday a few years ago, presents eleven interesting papers in Hudson's cognitively motivated Word Grammar framework. Several advantages of Hudson's simple framework are made clear by these interesting papers, including its cognitive basis and its ease of representing many complex phenomena across languages.' Edward Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Science, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT