Word Grammar

Richard Hudson

last changed 24 April 2009

Bibliographical information

This chapter will be published in the Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, edited by Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (Oxford University Press). The chapter was submitted in April 2008, and the book is due for publication in 2009. The pages are 951-983.

Abstract

Word Grammar (WG) combines elements from a wide range of other theories of language and cognition into a coherent theory of language as conceptual knowledge. The structure is a network built round an ‘isa’ hierarchy; the logic is multiple default inheritance; and the knowledge is learned and applied by two cognitive processes: spreading activation and node-creation.