Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing.
The Sociolinguistics of Grammar (Studies in Language Companion Series, Book 154)
The aim of this book is to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures.
The papers in this volume are linked by a common concern, which is at the centre of current linguistic enquiry: how do we classify and categorize linguistic data, and how does this process add to our understanding of linguistic change? The scene is set by Aitchison’s paper on the development of linguistic categorization over the past few decades, followed by Biggam’s critical overview of theoretical developments in colour semantics. Lexical classification in action is discussed in papers by Fischer, Kay and Sylvester on the structures of thesauruses, while detailed treatments of particular semantic areas are offered by Kleparski, Mikołajczuk, O’Hare and Peters.
The Ontology of Language: Properties, Individuals and Discourse
The book offers contributions to a number of topics in semantics, while at the same time providing an engaging discussion of key foundational issues and of what Property Theory can contribute to them. The book starts from a version of Property Theory which stems out of a combination of the lambda calculus with Aczel's Frege structures (a combination originally developed by Raymond Turner).
