Morphosyntactic Alterations in English: Functional Cognitive Perspectives (FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS) [Hardcover] Medina, Pilar Guerrero. Este artículo no está disponible.Morphosyntactic Alterations in English: Functional Cognitive Perspectives (FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS) [Hardcover] Medina, Pilar Guerrero

This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. The contributors to this volume deal with different types of “diathesis alternations” —broadly defined by Levin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993) as “alternations in the expressions of arguments, sometimes accompanied by changes of meaning” —i.e. transitivity alternations (such as the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation), alternations involving arguments within the VP (such as the Swarm-alternation, and the dative or benefactive alternations), etc. The volume will also include some contributions dealing more generally with the issues of morphological relatedness and verb-specific alternations within functionalist, cognitive and/or constructionist frameworks.

The book features a wide range of theoretical approaches, ranging from functionalist models such as Functional Discourse Grammar or the Cardiff Grammar version of Systemic Functional Linguistics to more cognitively-oriented approaches such as Goldberg’s Construction Grammar or Fillmore’s Frame Semantics. This attempt to describe morphosyntactic alternations within different contemporary theories¬¬ —derivational and non-derivational— will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic phenomena traditionally subsumed under the rubric of morphosyntactic alternation. The book will be of interest to experienced linguists and researchers of a functionalist, cognitivist or even functional-typological persuasion.

Pilar Guerrero Medina is Lecturer in English Grammar at the University of Cordoba, Spain. She has mainly conducted her research within a functionalist framework, focusing on the relationship between lexis and grammar on the one hand, and grammar and discourse on the other. Over the past decade, she has published articles on a range of topics, including transitivity in grammar and discourse, grammatical and lexical aspect, Object assignment and the get-passive. While the earlier articles are framed mainly within the Functional Grammar theory of Simon Dik, later work also incorporates insights from the Goldbergian version of Construction Grammar.