Fuzzy Grammar A Reader

by Aarts, Bas; Denison, David; Keizer, Evelien; Popova, Gergana

• ISBN13: 9780199262571
• ISBN10: 0199262578
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book brings together classic and recent papers in the philosophical and linguistic analysis of fuzzy grammar, of gradience in meaning, word classes, and syntax. Issues such as how many grains make a heap, when a puddle becomes a pond, and so forth, have occupied thinkers since Aristotle and over the last two decades been the subject of increasing interest among linguists as well as in fields such as artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.

Author Biography

Bas Aarts is Reader in Modern English Language and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. He has held visiting appointments at a number of universities, and is currently working on a monograph on linguistic gradience. His other publications include Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter 1992), The Verb in Contemporary English (Cambridge University Press 1995, edited with Charles F. Meyer), English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave Macmillan 1997/2001), Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English (John Benjamins 2002, with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis) and The Handbook of English Linguistics (Blackwell forthcoming, edited with April McMahon). Aarts is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics (with David Denison and Richard Hogg). David Denison is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Manchester and has held visiting appointments in Amsterdam, Vancouver, and Santiago. He has published widely on historical English syntax and semantics, notably English Historical Syntax (Longman 1993) and a major chapter in the Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press 1998). He has been joint editor of the Longman Linguistics Library and is (with Bas Aarts and Richard Hogg) a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics. Evelien Keizer obtained her PhD in English Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since then she has worked mainly on the noun phrase, both in Dutch and in English. She currently lectures at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and is writing a monograph on the structural, cognitive and communicative aspects of the English noun phrase. Gergana Popova is currently working on a PhD at the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex. Previously she held a position as a Lecturer in English Linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Sofia. Her research interests are in the areas of morphology and semantics.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction: The Nature of Grammatical Categories and their Representation	1	(28)
Part I Philosophical Background	29	(36)
Categories	31	(2)
Aristotle
Concepts	33	(2)
Gottlob Frege
Vagueness	35	(6)
Bertrand Russell
Family Resemblances	41	(4)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Phenomena of Vagueness	45	(20)
Rosanna Keefe
Part II Categories in Cognition	65	(114)
The Boundaries of Words and their Meanings	67	(24)
William Labov
Principles of Categorization	91	(18)
Eleanor Rosch
Categorization, Fuzziness, and Family Resemblances	109	(22)
Ray Jackendoff
Discreteness	131	(8)
Ronald W. Langacker
The Importance of Categorization	139	(40)
George Lakoff
Part III Categories in Grammar	179	(130)
Parts of Speech	181	(10)
Otto Jespersen
English Word Classes	191	(22)
David Crystal
A Notional Approach to the Parts of Speech	213	(12)
John Lyons
Syntactic Categories and Notional Features	225	(14)
John M. Anderson
Bounded Regions	239	(8)
Ronald W. Langacker
The Discourse Basis for Lexical Categories in Universal Grammar	247	(46)
Paul J. Hopper
Sandra A. Thompson
Grammatical Categories	293	(16)
John Taylor
Part IV Gradience in Grammar	309	(138)
Gradience	311	(10)
Dwight Bolinger
Degrees of Grammaticalness	321	(6)
Noam Chomsky
Descriptive Statement and Serial Relationship	327	(14)
Randolph Quirk
On the Analysis of Linguistic Vagueness	341	(10)
Jiri V. Neustupny
Nouniness	351	(72)
John Robert Ross
The Coordination--Subordination Gradient	423	(8)
Randolph Quirk
Sidney Greenbaum
Geoffrey Leech
Jan Svartvik
The Nature of Graded Judgments	431	(16)
Carson T. Schutze
Part V Criticisms and Responses	447	(64)
Description of Language Design	449	(12)
Martin Joos
`Prototypes Save'	461	(18)
Anna Wierzbicka
Fuzziness and Categorization	479	(8)
Denis Bouchard
The Discrete Nature of Syntactic Categories: Against a Prototype-based Account	487	(24)
Frederick J. Newmeyer
Subject Index	511	(8)
Author Index	519	(6)
Language Index	525