The idea behind the seminar is to show that it is not just words and “morphemes” that contribute to the meaning of an utterance, but that the speakers of a language have thousands of prefabricated expressions at their disposal, which they use in a more or less flexible way in discourse. Linguists know today that grammar and vocabulary are not completely different things and that constructing a meaningful sentence does not mean that you first “generate” a formal grammatical structure and then insert words in the appropriate places to make it meaningful.

The seminar will thus put a certain focus on topics such as the following:

• Are some greens greener than others?

• Do speakers of different languages perceive colours differently?

• Is language less tidy than structuralists thought?

• To what extent are the morphemes of structuralist linguistics cognitively plausible?

• Strategies speakers of the English language employ to express new concepts.

• The gradient between collocation, idiomaticity and word formation.

• Sinclair’s and Langacker’s insistence on the importance of the phrase: extended units of meaning and the idiom principle.

• In what way do grammatical constructions (argument structure constructions, tense, aspects etc.) express meaning?

• Grammaticalization: why going to has come to express ‘future time’ and why it does not make sense to ask whether this is “lexical” or “grammatical.

• How children learn to understand and express meaning.

• How we know that speakers make use of pre-fabricated multi-word units (chunks) (psycholinguistic and experimental evidence).

• Gestures and linguistic ways of expressing meaning.