Reviews for Pragmatic Development

The average rating for Pragmatic Development based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-08-17 00:00:00 Kaidon Blake This is a very interesting but also a very dense book. In the preface, Croft gives reasons for why he decided to introduce "yet another syntactic theory" -- the main one is his profound dissatisfaction with any existing theory when it comes to explaining cross-linguistic phenomena. Questions like "do all languages have adjectives/subjects/transitive verbs?" are pointless unless there are universal definitions of adjectives, subjects, etc. and there are none. The existing ones usually offer a few "tests", and it is never the case that all the tests apply or fail. Moreover, the problem with many definitions is that they are circular. So, what Croft proposes instead is "radical" because, in a sense, it goes away from any universality and dismisses syntactic categories and relations as primitives altogether. The primitive in his theory is the construction, and speaking about syntactic roles makes sense only w.r.t. a certain construction. Generalizations on the language level like "X is (not) an ergative language" are meaningless because there is a chance that you find constructions of any kind in any language (for example, Croft shows that there are instances of the ergative construction in Russian). The book would not be as interesting as it is if all Croft did were to express his frustration with existing theories, list tons of counter-examples from all the exotic language he has come across in his life (and there are many) and reject any notion of universality. In fact, he does make universal claims but they are semantic by nature and are expressed in terms of conceptual spaces. Croft's definitions might look not as "practical" as those adopted in other theories but at least there are good reasons to believe that they have more to do with reality. Exotic examples are abundant in RCG and it seems that sometimes they don't make it easier to understand the theory. I wish there were another book which would focus on just two or three languages (English, because everyone knows it, Spanish (French or German), because it is a bit different and many people know it, and, say, Finnish, because it is quite different but well studied) and present a mode detailed study for each language.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-29 00:00:00 Joseph Wolf Clear, but outdated.