William Croft (Linguist)

William Croft ( born 1956 ) is an American linguist.

Life

Croft PhD in 1986 from Stanford University 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 teaches at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

His research 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 construction grammar, which is characterized in that the grammatical construction regarded as the only primitive element of language structure and derives all other categories of constructions. Since constructions Croft must be considered strictly individual languages ​​, there is in the Radical Construction Grammar no cross-linguistic grammatical categories. Language universals must be declared according to Croft exclusively by their anchoring in the cognitive system. In addition, Croft deals with the formation 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 0521667704th
• William Croft: Typology and Universals. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0521004993 ( first edition, 1990, ISBN 052136583X ).
• William Croft, Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in typological Perspective. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0198299540th
• William Croft: Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. Longman, Harlow 2000, ISBN 0582356776th