Bøker av Paul Kay

A thorough investigation into idioms and their grand meaning, including how best to analyze them. Any theory of idioms should be part and parcel of a general theory of grammar, adding as little machinery to one's overall grammatical approach as possible in describing both the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies and regularities of this large class of linguistic expressions. This volume presents several lexicalist analyses of idioms within the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, reflecting three guiding principles: many but not all idioms are syntactically and semantically compositional, dividing into distinct classes; idioms are analyzable in terms of a suitably rich lexicon and a set of constructions (lexical and syntactic rules) with corresponding meaning representations; and idiomaticity is a gradient phenomenon, exhibiting wide variation in degree of syntactic flexibility and meaning.

A multilingual study of color nomenclature. It studies 110 additional unwritten languages in detail and in situ. It presents the results with charts showing the overall palette of color terms within each language, as well as the levels of agreement among speakers.

Explores the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of colour lexicons.