New Book in Functional Linguistics: Bybee/Hopper

[Paul Peranteau]

John Benjamins Publishing announces a new work in Functional Linguistics:

Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure.
Joan Bybee (University of New Mexico) and Paul Hopper (Carnegie Mellon
University Pittsburgh)
Typological Studies in Language 45  2001. vii, 492 pp
US & Canada:    HB:1 58811 027 3  USD 125.00            PB: 1 58811 028
1  USD 42.95
Rest of world:  HB:  90 272 2947 3  NLG 275.00  PB:  90 272 2948 1  NLG 95.00/
.
A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic
elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become
conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are
basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are
frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of
use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural
conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition
and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book
support two major principles. First, the content of people's interactions
consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated
by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the
frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a
profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory
storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the
ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

Contributions by:Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper; Sandra A. Thompson and Paul J.
Hopper; Joanne Scheibman; Naomi Hallan; Betty S. Phillips; Janet B.
Pierrehumbert; Stefan Frisch, Nathan R. Large, Bushra Zawaydeh and David B.
Pisoni; Mary L. Hare, Michael Ford and William D. Marslen-Wilson; Greville
Corbett, Andrew Hippisley, Dunstan Brown and Paul Marriott; Daniel
Jurafsky, Alan Bell, Michelle Gregory and William D. Raymond; Nathan Bush;
Catie Berkenfield; Manfred G. Krug; Joan Bybee; K. Aaron Smith; Joyce Tang
Boyland; Shana Poplack, Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon; Brian Macwhinney; Östen Dahl.





                                 John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Offices:                Philadelphia
Amsterdam:
Websites:               http://www.benjamins.com
http://www.benjamins.nl
E-mail:         service at benjamins.com
customer.services at benjamins.nl
Phone:          +215 836-1200                           +31 20 6304747
Fax:                    +215 836-1204                           +31 20 6739773