Book on Constructive Linguistics
The book on Constructive Linguistics I wrote with Federico Gobbo is now available on the publisher’s site.
Here the details:
Constructive Adpositional Grammars: Foundations of Constructive Linguistics
Author: Federico Gobbo and Marco Benini
Date Of Publication: Aug 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3007-2
Isbn: 1-4438-3007-0
This book presents a new paradigm of natural language grammar analysis, based on adposition as the key concept, considered a general connection between two morphemes—or group of morphemes. The adpositional paradigm considers the morpheme as the basic unit to represent morphosyntax, taken as a whole, in terms of constructions, while semantics and pragmatics are treated accordingly.All linguistic observations within the book can be described through the methods and tools of Constructive Mathematics, so that the modelling become formally feasible. A full description in category-theoretic terms of the formal model is provided in the Appendix. A lot of examples taken from natural languages belonging to different typological areas are offered throughout the volume, in order to explain and validate the modeling—with a special attention to ergativity. Finally, a first real-world application of the paradigm is given, i.e., conversational analysis of the transcript of therapeutic settings in terms of constructive speech acts.
The main goal of this book is to broaden the scope of Linguistics by including Constructive Mathematics in order to deal with known topics such as grammaticalization, children speech, language comparison, dependency and valency from a different perspective. It primarily concerns advanced students researchers in the field of Theoretical and Mathematical Linguistics but the audience can also include scholars interested in applications of Topos Theory in Linguistics.
I should warn the readers that the application of Topos Theory is still limited, although the path for a deeper integration has been sketched.
Marco Benini 