William Croft (Linguist)

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William Croft (* 1956 ) is an American linguist .

Life

Croft received his PhD from Stanford University in 1986 with Joseph Greenberg . From 1986 to 1993 he was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan , Ann Arbor, and from 1994 to 2005 at the University of Manchester. Since 2006 he has taught at the University of New Mexico , Albuquerque.

In his research, he mainly deals with language universals , especially in the areas of aspect , argument structure and grammatical categories . He is the creator of the Radical Construction Grammar ( Radical Construction Grammar ), a version of the design grammar, which is characterized in that the grammatical construction considered a single primitive element of language structure and derives all other categories of constructions. Since Croft constructions must be viewed strictly in terms of individual languages, there are no cross-language grammatical categories in Radical Construction Grammar. According to Croft, language universals can therefore only be explained by their anchoring in the cognitive system. In addition, Croft deals with the development and change of languages ​​from an evolutionary theoretical perspective.

Works (selection)

  • William Croft and D. Alan Cruse: Cognitive Linguistics . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-66770-4 .
  • William Croft: Typology and Universals . 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-00499-3 (1st edition 1990, ISBN 052136583X ).
  • William Croft: Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-19-829954-0 .
  • William Croft: Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach . Longman, Harlow 2000, ISBN 0-582-35677-6 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Croft, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American linguist, professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico
DATE OF BIRTH 1956