The problem of form and meaning in morphology has produced an impressive amount of scholarly work over the last hundred years. Nevertheless, many issues continue to be in need of clarification. The present volume assembles 18 selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna, 9–12 February 2012) relating to this vast field of research. The introduction provides a detailed overview of the state of the art in the field. It is followed by three articles derived from the plenaries that are dedicated to fundamental issues such as the relationship between morphological meaning and concepts, between word formation and meaning change, as well as indirect coding.
The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information, including figure-ground relations, image-schematic structures, and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure.In sections two and three papers are presented on cross-categorial polysemy between lexical and grammatical uses of a morpheme, and between different grammatical senses, and on the relationship between earlier lexical senses and later grammatical ones.
In this book John A. Hawkins argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural options from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap.
This book considers how language users express and understand literal and metaphorical spatial meaning not only in language but also through gesture and pointing. Researchers explore the ways in which theoretical developments in language and cognition, new empirical techniques, and new computational facilities have led to a greater understanding of the relationship between physical space and mental space as expressed in human communication.
The development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990: A corpus-based study
This dissertation tackles some of these and other questions concerning the nature of phrasal verbs. On the one hand, I intend to delimit the concept of phrasal verb as conceived of in PDE. On the other hand, I aim at filling a gap in literature of phrasal verbs by carrying out a corpus analysis of the development of these structures in the most recent history of English, more precisely between 1650 and 1990. The third aim of the present dissertation is to establish a relationship between these structures and the processes of grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization.
