Syntactic Gradience

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in Contemporary English, co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997; 2001): Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English, co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis (John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader co-edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); and The Handbook of English Linguistics co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006). With David Denison and Richard Hogg he is a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics.

Aarts's judicious tackling of a tricky subject deserves praise. This book is likely to be regarded as a landmark in the study of indeterminacy and gradience for years to come.

• 1. Introduction ; PART I THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ; 2. Categorization in Linguistics ; 3. Grammatical Gradience ; 4. Gradience and Related Notions ; PART II GRADIENCE IN ENGLISH CASE STUDIES ; 5. Subsective Gradience ; 6. Intersective Gradience ; 7. Constructional Gradience ; PART III FORMALIZATION ; 8. Modelling Syntactic Gradience ; References ; Index