The Grammar of the Utterance

Book excerpt: "This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer-i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside-, the book's empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalises the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar"--