Guerrero Medina, Pilar (ed.) Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Equinox Publishing. 2011. 383 pages.
ISBN: 978 1 84553 744 9
http://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=439&keyword=morphosyntactic
This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. This collection of articles is organized in two main parts. Part I brings together four papers of a more theoretical orientation, which focus on the notion of alternation and/or verb classification, also providing descriptive evidence for the grammatical approaches to language where they are couched. Part II consists of ten specific studies of particular alternations which involve either a change in the configuration of semantic roles (e.g., the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation) or a change in the morphosyntactic expression and/or placement of arguments, without necessarily affecting the transitivity of the verb (e.g., the material/product alternation, verb-particle alternations or the so-called Swarm alternation).
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.
Morphosyntactic Alternations in English will be of interest to experienced linguists and researchers of a functionalist, cognitivist or even functional-typological persuasion.