Syntactic Categories Their Identification and Description in Linguistic Theories

This book offers a systematic account of syntactic categories - the building blocks of sentences and the units of grammatical analysis - and explains their place in different theories of language. It sets out and clarifies the conflicting definitions of competing frameworks which frequently make it hard or impossible to compare grammars. Gisa Rauh describes the history and nature of traditional and contemporary accounts and definitions of grammatical categories. She explains their properties and use in generative, cognitive, and functional theories, and considers their function in language typology. She distinguishes between the cognitive functions of categories that relate to traditional parts of speech and serve to structure a language's lexicon; and those which determine the syntactic behaviour of the linguistic items they specify. Professor Rauh illustrates her account with a wide range of examples. Her clear and balanced exposition will be welcomed by students and scholars in all branches of linguistics as well as by those in related subjects such as computational science and the philosophy of language.

Gisa Rauh has been Professor of Linguistics in the English Department of the University of Wuppertal since 1985. She taught previously at Gottingen University and the Free University of Berlin. Her areas of research include theoretical and empirical aspects of deixis, the theory of thematic relations, the syntax of prepositions and prepositional phrases in English, aspects of the lexicon, and linguistic categorization. She has been involved in various large-scale projects, among them Theory of the Lexicon and the European Network Project in the Area of Languages. Her books include Linguistische Beschreibung deiktischer Komplexitat in narrativen Texten (Narr, 1978), Essays on Deixis (Narr, 1983), Tiefenkasus, thematische Relationen und Thetarollen. Die Entwicklung einer Theorie von semantischen Relationen (Narr, 1988) and, with Elisabeth Lobel, Lexikalische Kategorien und Merkmale (Niemeyer, 1997).