Language usage and language structure (De Gruyter Mouton, 2010)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction -- Usage and structure: the case of clausal complementation: What conversational English tells us about the nature of grammar: a critique of Thompson's analysis of object complements / Frederick J. Newmeyer -- Usage, structure, scientific explanation, and the role of abstraction, by linguists and by language users / Arie Verhagen -- Raising verbs and auxiliaries in a functional theory of grammatical status / Kasper Boye -- The rise of structure: How not to disagree: the emergence of structure from usage / Ronald W. Langacker -- Paradigmatic structure in a usage-based theory of grammaticalisation / Lars Heltoft -- Where do simple clauses come from? / T. Givón -- Structure, usage and variation: Alternative agreement controllers in Danish: usage or structure? / Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen and Mads Poulsen -- Schmidt redux: How systematic is the linguistic system if variation is rampant? / Dirk Geeraerts -- More tiles on the roof: further thoughts on incremental language production / J. Lachlan Mackenzie -- Reconciling structure and usage: on the advantages of a dynamic, dialogic conception of the linguistic sign / Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen -- Methodology: Ten unwarranted assumptions in syntactic argumentation / William Croft
The volume addresses an issue hotly debated in current linguistic theory: the relation between language usage and language structure. The contributors represent different theoretical positions. What they have in common is that they recognize structure and usage as non-reducible linguistic phenomena and take seriously the challenge to describe the relation between them