The present text, entitled Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology by William Croft, is a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor William Croft in November 2010 as one of the three forum speakers for the 8th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. William Croft received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1986. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Croft’s areas of specialty are typology, semantics, cognitive linguistics, construction grammar and evolutionary models of language change. His publications include Typology and Universals (2nd edition, 2003), Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations (1991), Explaining Language Change (2000), Radical Construction Grammar (2001), Cognitive Linguistics (with Alan Cruse, 2004) and Verbs (2012). Croft has held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. More information about Professor Croft and his research can be found on his website: http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft.
The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics provides a forum for eminent international scholars to talk to Chinese audiences. It is a continuing program organized by nine prestigious universities in Beijing. The main organizing institution is Beihang University (BUAA); co-sponsors for CIFCL8 include Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and Beijing Forestry University. Professor Croft’s lecture series was mainly supported by the Beihang University Grant for International Outstanding Scholars for 2010 (Project number: Z1057, Project organizer: Thomas Fuyin Li).
The text is published as one of the Eminent Linguists Lecture Series. The transcription of the lectures, proofreading of the text, and publication of the work in its present book form, has involved many people’s strenuous inputs. The initial drafts were completed by the following postgraduate students from Beihang University: Chao Chen, Miaomiao Dou, Rong Han, Fan Tian, Dongfang Wang, Yue Wu, Na Yang, Zuan Zhang, Jingyuan Zhao, Xueqing Zhou. Then we editors did the word-by-word and line-by-line revision. To improve the readability of the text, we have deleted the false starts, repetitions, fillers like now, so, you know, OK, and so on, again, of course, if you like, sort of, etc. Occasionally, the written version needs an additional word to be clear, a word that was not actually spoken in the lecture. We have added such words within single brackets [...]. To make the written version readable, even without watching the film, we’ve added a few “stage instructions”, in italics also within single brackets: [...]. The stage instruction describes what the speaker was doing, such as pointing at a slide, showing an object, etc. The speaker, Professor Croft, did the final revision with the assistance of Steve Pepper. The published version is the final version approved by the speaker.
Thomas Fuyin Li
Beihang University (BUAA)
Yan Ding
Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU)