Syntactic Gradience The Nature of Grammatical

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Profess

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in Contemporary English, co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997; 2001): Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English, co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis (John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader co-edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); and The Handbook of English Linguistics co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006). With David Denison and Richard Hogg he is a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics.

Abbreviations	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Theoretical Background	p. 7
Categorization in Linguistics	p. 9
Introduction	p. 9
The classical philosophical tradition of categorization	p. 11
The linguistic tradition: early grammarians	p. 14
Twentieth-century approaches to linguistic categorization	p. 17
Bloomfield and American structuralism	p. 17
Transformational grammar	p. 18
Generative Semantics	p. 23
Descriptive grammar	p. 25
Cognitive approaches	p. 26
Functional-typological and discourse typological linguistics	p. 30
Other frameworks: Phrase Structure Grammar and Construction Grammar	p. 32
Grammatical Gradience	p. 34
Introduction	p. 34
Notions of gradience in ancient and modern philosophy	p. 35
The linguistic tradition: early grammarians	p. 38
Twentieth-century approaches to gradience	p. 39
The post-Bloomfieldians and Bolinger	p. 39
Firth and Halliday	p. 42
Transformational Grammar	p. 43
Generative Semantics	p. 52
Logical approaches to linguistic vagueness: the Prague school, Zadeh, and Ross	p. 58
Descriptive grammar	p. 62
Cognitive approaches	p. 68
Functional-typological and discourse-typological linguistics	p. 71
Optimality Theory	p. 72
Probability Theory	p. 73
Other frameworks: Phrase Structure Grammar, Word Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Construction Grammar	p. 75
Two types of gradience	p. 79
Gradience and Related Notions	p. 80
Introduction	p. 80
Serial relationship	p. 80
Syntactic mixing: mergers	p. 83
Multiple analysis and reanalysis	p. 86
Gradience and Prototype Theory	p. 87
Gradience and Markedness Theory	p. 90
Gradience in English: Case Studies	p. 95
Subsective Gradience	p. 97
SG within word classes	p. 97
Verbs	p. 98
Nouns	p. 101
Adjectives	p. 105
Prepositions	p. 107
SG within phrases	p. 111
SG within clauses	p. 117
SG in grammar	p. 121
Intersective Gradience	p. 124
IG between word classes	p. 124
Gradience between pre-head elements within noun phrases	p. 124
Determinatives and pronouns	p. 125
Determinatives and adjectives	p. 125
Determinatives and adverbs	p. 127
Adjectives and nouns	p. 129
Adjectives and adverbs	p. 136
Gradience between verbs and other word classes	p. 138
Verbs and adjectives	p. 138
Verbs and nouns	p. 143
Verbs and prepositions/conjunctions	p. 145
Verbs and adverbs	p. 149
Further cases	p. 150
Adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions	p. 150
Adverbs and nouns	p. 155
Adjectives and prepositions	p. 156
IG between phrases	p. 158
Adjective phrases and noun phrases	p. 158
Adjective phrases and prepositional phrases	p. 160
Noun phrases and prepositional phrases	p. 161
IG in grammar	p. 162
Constructional Gradience	p. 164
Introduction	p. 164
A brief history of the notion 'construction'	p. 164
Structuralism and Transformational Grammar	p. 164
Descriptive grammar	p. 166
Cognitive Linguistics	p. 167
Constructionist frameworks	p. 168
The notion 'construction'	p. 170
Constructional Gradience	p. 171
Subsective Constructional Gradience (SCG)	p. 171
Pseudoclefts	p. 172
Constructions involving subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI)	p. 173
Verb + NP and Verb + NP + NP constructions	p. 173
Transitive constructions	p. 174
The possessive construction	p. 175
Complex prepositions	p. 176
The passive gradient	p. 178
Intersective Constructional Gradience (ICG)	p. 180
Genitival constructions	p. 180
Taylor's possessive constructions gradient	p. 181
Coordination and subordination	p. 182
Verb complementation: monotransitive, ditransitive, and complex transitive constructions	p. 185
Complements and adjuncts	p. 186
Syntactic blends and fusions	p. 187
Constructional Gradience in grammar	p. 192
Vague meaning	p. 193
'Too much' meaning	p. 194
'Too little' meaning	p. 195
A purely syntactic approach to constructions	p. 196
Formalization	p. 199
Modelling Syntactic Gradience	p. 201
Introduction	p. 201
Vagueness, representations, and gradience	p. 202
Eliminating vagueness by looking more closely: apparent sameness	p. 203
Eliminating vagueness by looking more closely: apparent differences	p. 203
Determinatives: a further case of apparent sameness?	p. 204
A formalization of Subsective Gradience and Intersective Gradience	p. 205
Subsective Gradience	p. 205
Intersective Gradience	p. 207
Some applications	p. 208
SG in the adjective class	p. 209
IG between verbs and nouns: the English gerund	p. 210
IG between verbs and adjectives	p. 214
IG between adjectives and prepositions: near and like	p. 215
Complementizers and prepositions	p. 219
Constructions: V + NP + [to-infinitive] vs. V + [NP + to-infinitive]	p. 222
The present account vs. the Aristotelian and 'Sorites' models	p. 223
The syntactic properties of the categories	p. 225
How can we be sure to identify all the relevant properties, and are all the properties equally important?	p. 225
How can we know that a particular property is an independent one and not merely a variant of an already identified property?	p. 227
Is it indeed the case that the syntactic properties that characterize a particular form class are unique to that class?	p. 227
Is it true that an element belonging to a particular class can converge on at most one other word class in any one syntactic configuration?	p. 228
'True hybridity'	p. 228
The nature of grammatical categories	p. 234
The contiguity of grammatical categories	p. 235
Conclusion	p. 241
References	p. 243
Index	p. 265
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Syntactic Gradience The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy

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