LINGUIST List 11.1236

Fri Jun 2 2000

Books: Cognitive Grammar, General Theoretical Ling

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Kim Lewis Brown, Cognitive Grammar: Parameters of Slavic Aspect, S. Dickey
2. Kim Lewis Brown, General Theoretical Ling: Strong Generative Capacity, P. Miller

Dickey, Stephen (University of Virginia); PARAMETERS OF SLAVIC 
ASPECT; ISBN: 1-57586-236-0 (paper), 1-57586-235-2 (cloth) 328 pages. 
CSLI Publications 2000: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu 
email:pubscsli.stanford.edu

Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach presents the first
detailed comparative analysis of verbal aspect in the Slavic
languages. Dickey divides the Slavic languages into two aspectual
groups, an eastern and a western group as well as a transitional zone
between the two. This book shows the semantic meaning of aspect in
these groups, analyzed within the framework of cognitive grammar.
Dickey offers the first comparative analysis of Slavic aspect treating
more than two languages, and the first book-length cognitive
linguistic analysis of Slavic aspect.

Dickey establishes seven parameters of variation in aspectual usage:
habituality, the simple denotation of past actions, the historical
present, stage directions and other instructions, performatives and
other cases of the coincidence of utterance and action, the
imperfective in sequences of actions, and the derivation of verbal
nouns. These parameters are used as a basis for dividing the Slavic
languages into the western group of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian,
the eastern group of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and the
transitional zone of Serbo-Croatian and Polish. Dickey uses concepts
from cognitive grammar to construct a semantic analysis of the
category of aspect in each group and in the transitional zone.
Ultimately, Dickey shows that western aspect centers around the
category of totality, whereas eastern aspect centers around a category
of temporal definiteness.



*************************
CSLI Publications
Ventura Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4115
Telephone (650) 723-1839
Fax (650) 725-2166
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/

Miller, Philip (University of Lille); STRONG GENERATIVE CAPACITY; 
ISBN: 1-57586-214-X (paper), 1-57586-213-1 (cloth) 160 pages. CSLI 
Publications 2000: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu 
email:pubscsli.stanford.edu

The concept of "strong generative capacity" (SGC) of a linguistic
formalism was introduced by Chomsky in the early sixties in order to
characterize descriptive capacity. However, the original definition
proposed by Chomsky turned out to be unuseable, especially when one
wished to compare the SGC of different types of formalisms. This book
provides for the first time a rigorous and useful characterization of
SGC, defining it as the model theoretic semantics of linguistic
formalism. Specifically, abstract interpretation domains are defined
in theory-neutral set-theoretical terms, and the SGC of a theory with
respect to a given interpretation domain is characterized as the range
of a specific interpretation function mapping structural descriptions
of that theory into elements of that domain. Interpretation domains
are defined for such notions as labeled constituency, dependency,
endocentricity and linking and applied to the analysis of a range of
linguistic formalisms, among which context-free grammars, dependency
grammars, X-bar grammars, tree-adjoing grammars, transformational
grammars and categorial grammars.




CSLI Publications
Ventura Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4115
Telephone (650) 723-1839
Fax (650) 725-2166
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/