Briefly Noted

Seeking to develop the first satisfying universal definition of basic grammatical units of the major syntactic categories such as "noun," "verb," and "adjective" and of the principal grammatical relations, "subject," "object," and "oblique," William Croft employs the methods of cross-linguistic or typological analysis and cognitive linguistics. Drawing evidence from a wide variety of languages, Croft shows that the traditional semantic definitions for the major syntactic categories (e.g., nouns denote persons and things) represent the unmarked correlation or "prototype" for the syntactic functions of reference, predications, and modification. Turning to recent work in cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, Croft argues that the syntactic functions represent universal ways of conceptualizing experience for the purpose of communicating information in language. Croft then applies this hypothesis to grammatical relations between the verb and its dependent subject, object, and oblique noun phrases, arguing that one cannot account for cross-linguistic patterns of marking using semantic roles such as "agent" or "instrument." He proposes instead an "idealized (prototypical) cognitive model" of verb-meaning based on causal relations among participants in the action that human beings use in conceptualizing events, which largely determines the choice of subject, object, and oblique forms.-From the publisher's announcement