A Cognitive Approach to the Verb: Morphological and Constructional Perspectives

The book contains a selection of papers from the conference The Verb in Cognitive Linguistics, held at Gran, Norway in June, 1998. The papers in this book are all written within a cognitive linguistics framework, concentrated around different linguistic aspects of the verb. The two keynote papers (by Richard A. Hudson and Ronald W. Langacker) serve as an introduction to this main theme, providing a broad perspective and a general, theoretical background from Word Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, respectively. The remaining ten papers are more closely aiming at addressing morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects of the verb, illustrated through a variety of languages and research areas, including, i.a., adult language processing, language acquisition, connectionist modelling, and typology. A majority of the papers describe different aspects of Norwegian – a language not earlier investigated at such a scale within cognitive linguistics. Norwegian offers valuable contributions through being closely related to English, yet differing in certain important and interesting ways. In addition, data from several other languages are included, among others Italian, Russian, and different African languages, providing a wider typological range. Hanna Gram Simonsen, Department of Linguistics, University of Oslo, Norway. Rolf Theil Endresen, Professor of general and African linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Oslo, Norway.