This title develops an approach to language change based on construction grammar in order to reconceptualise grammaticalisation and lexicalisation. The authors show that language change proceeds by micro-steps involving every aspect of grammar including pragmatics and discourse …
Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in ce…
Main description: Based on Chinese historical data collected over the past three thousand years, the articles in the volume investigate the development of new grammatical categories and the process of lexicalization and grammaticalization of unique grammatical words. All these s…
In this book, the focus is on the semantic aspect of the formation of new words rather than on generating the form as is more traditional. Each chapter concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts…
In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various approaches to lexicalization, a process of language change whereby concepts are adopted into the lexicon. Drawing on a number of case studies from the history of English, they then propose a new…
