The proposed framework of concept linking combines insights of construction grammar with those of traditional functional descriptions to explain particularly challenging but often neglected areas of English grammar such as negation, modality, adverbials and non-finite constructions. To reach this goal the idea of a unified network of constructions is replaced by the triad of verb-mediated constructions, attribution and scope-based perspectivizing, each of them understood as a syntactically effective concept-linking mechanism in its own right, but involved in interfaces with the other mechanisms. In addition, concept linking supplies a novel approach to early child language. It casts fresh light on widely accepted descriptions of early two-word utterances and verb islands in usage-based models of language acquisition and encourages a new view of children’s ‘mistakes’. Intended readership: Constructionist and cognitive linguists; linguists and psychologists interested in language acquisition; teachers and students of English grammar and grammar in general.

Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts: A Discourse-Based Approach to English Grammar is a book for language teachers and learners that focuses on the meanings of grammatical constructions within discourse, rather than on language as structure governed by rigid rules. This text emphasizes the ways in which users of language construct meaning, express viewpoints, and depict imageries using the conceptual, meaning-filled categories that underlie all of grammar. Written by a team of authors with years of experience teaching grammar to future teachers of English, this book puts grammar in the context of real language and illustrates grammar in use through an abundance of authentic data examples. Each chapter also provides a variety of activities that focus on grammar, genre, discourse, and meaning, which can be used as they are or can be adapted for classroom practice. The activities are also designed to raise awareness about discourse, grammar, and meaning in all facets of everyday life, and can be used as springboards for upper high school, undergraduate, and graduate level research projects and inquiry-based grammatical analysis. Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts is an ideal textbook for those in the areas of teacher education, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, second language teaching, ESL, EFL, and communications who are looking to teach and learn grammar from a dynamic perspective.

This innovative volume provides a comprehensive integrated account of the study of conceptual figures, demonstrating the ways in which figures and in particular, conflictual figures, encapsulate linguistic expression in the fullest sense and in turn, how insights gleaned from their study can contribute to the wider body of linguistic research. With a specific focus on metaphor and metonymy, the book offers a unified and systematic typology of linguistic figures, drawing on a number of different approaches, including both traditional and emerging frameworks within cognitive linguistics as well as syntactic theory, while also providing an exhaustive look at the unique features of a variety of conceptual figures, including metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, and synecdoche. In its aim of reconciling historically opposed theoretical approaches to the study of conflictual figures while also incorporating a thorough account of its distinctive varieties, this volume will be essential reading for researchers and scholars in cognitive linguistics, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and literary studies.

This book is an introduction to Word Grammar, a theory of language structure founded and developed by Dick Hudson. In this theory, language is a cognitive network - a network of concepts, words and meanings containing all the elements of a linguistic analysis. The theory of language is therefore embedded in a theory of knowledge, in which there are no boundaries between one form of knowledge and any other. The most controversial idea in Word Grammar syntax is that phrase structure is redundant, because all its work can be done by means of dependencies between individual words. Word-word dependency is therefore a key concept in Word Grammar, and the syntax and semantics of a sentence is built upon this foundation. Contributors to this volume are primarily Word Grammar grammarians from across the world. All the chapters here manifest theoretical potentialities of Word Grammar, exploring how powerful Word Grammar is to offer analysis for linguistic phenomena in various languages. The chapters come from varying perspectives and include work on a number of languages, including English, German, Japanese, Swahili, Turkish and Ancient Greek. Phenomena studied include verbal inflection, case agreement, extraction, construction and code-mixing. This collection will be of interest to academics encountering Word Grammar for the first time, or for those who are already familiar with this theory and are interested in reading how it has evolved and what its future may hold.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed scientific proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management, S-BPM ONE 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, in April 2012. The 12 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions and are completed by one invited keynote paper and a summary of the tutorial onsubject-oriented business process management. S-BPM as a discipline is characterized by a seamless approach toward the analysis, modeling, implementation, execution, and maintenance of business processes, with an explicit stakeholder focus. This year's contributions address all life-cycle activities, in particular analyzing business objectives, subject behavior design and integration, and automating complex work procedures.

As a gateway to central questions in linguistics, non-finiteness is unavoidable in both typological studies and aspects of natural language processing, such as text segmentation and annotation. This study presents a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure.

Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a highly original account of cognition - of how we get to grips with the world in thought. The question at the heart of her book is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', but answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The starting assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Millikan makes a number of innovations. Central to the book is her introduction of the ideas of unitrackers and unicepts, whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience. She offers a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms; a naturalist sketch of conceptual development; a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information; a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction; a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs; new descriptions of indexicals, demonstratives and intensional contexts; and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.