COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

dirk geeraertsand hubert cuyckens1. Introduction Cognitive Linguistics as represented in this Handbook is an approach to the analy-sis of natural language that originated in the late seventies and early eighties in thework of George Lakoff, Ron Langacker, and Len Talmy, and that focuse[r]

was one of the first scholars in Cognitive Linguistics to recognize the importanceof conceptual metonymy as a natural inference schema that underlies much ofpragmatic reasoning (see, e.g., Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing,withLindaThornburg, 2003). He is a member of the editorial boar[r]

independence based on linear precedence. Soon afterwards, he started to partici-pate in the emerging community of cognitive linguists. From his dissertation workonwards, he has been especially interested in linking up the study of grammar withthe use of language in discourse. He has taught at[r]

Semantic Analysis of the Russian Verbal Prefixes ZA-, PERE-, DO- and OT- (1986); AGeography of Case Semantics: The Czech Dative and the Russian Instrumental (1993);Back from the Brink: A Study of How Relic Forms in Languages Serve as Source Ma-terial for Analogical Extension (1996); Common and Compar[r]

inanimate motion.Dewell (1994) argues that typical accounts of over in Cognitive Linguistics positseveral features, such as the shape of and contact with a landmark, as well as pos-iting across and above as subschemas, which Dewell regards as separate schemasaltogether. Although Dewell[r]

Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argumentstructure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Gonzalez-Marquez, Monica, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J. Spivey, eds.2007. Methods in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Goossens[r]

category membership as a digital, all-or-none phenomenon. That is, muchwork in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology assumes that ca-tegories are logical bounded entities, membership in which is defined by an item’spossession of a simple set of criterial features, in which all[r]

14–15), traditional philosophical thought, as we know it, can and should be set asideon the basis of empirical results based on embodied cognition and achieved withinCognitive Linguistics. If we look at this strain in the book, it inscribes itself in thetwentieth-century tradition of science-[r]

Proposals such as these illustrate the unmistakable tendency in recent text-linguistic work to use the notions of subjectification and perspective. This tendencygoes back on Ducrot (1980), who already stressed the diaphonic nature of dis-course. Even in monologic texts traces can be found of other ‘‘[r]

within the discipline is also a reflection of the nature of Cognitive Linguistics as it isunderstood by its practitioners. If Cognitive Linguistics is the study of ways inwhich features of language reflect other aspects of human cognition, then meta-phors provide one of the[r]

for the presentation and analyses of Neoclassical Theories, the Theory-Theory, andConceptual Atomism). The systematic comparison of theoretical models, then,should be an essential concern for the further development of semantics in Cog-nitive Linguistics.Second, another pertinent issue in [r]

1. Two complementary types of blocking are involved here, synonymic and hom-onymic blocking: stealer is blocked by an entrenched linguistic form encoding the concept‘person who steals’, while Bauer is blocked because this form is already entrenched as ameans of encoding a different concept (see Schm[r]

seem to be stable: there is evidence from attribute-listing experiments that cate-gories may move from the subordinate to the basic level when they gain in culturalimportance (see Ungerer and Schmid 1998: 84–91; also Ungerer and Schmid 1996:92–95). Words like (motor)car or (air)plane, for instance,[r]

2. A topic that we will not be able to pursue in detail is the demarcation betweendifferent types of meaning. Different types of meaning relatedness of the same form have,in fact, been identified and labeled. One such case of lexical ambiguity is ‘‘classical poly-semy’’ or ‘‘polycentric categorizatio[r]

pairs with the semantic properties of ‘primary responsibility’, ‘control’, and ‘volition’,as one typically finds in Agent-subject sentences. In Patient-subject sentences, onefinds that the properties of the Patient are more responsible for what happens thanthose of the Agent. So ‘primary responsibilit[r]

‘‘neural’’ version of CMT (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Within this framework (whichrepresents cognitive structures in computational ‘‘neural nets’’; see the discussionof computational models of metaphor below), the mappings that constitute pri-mary metaphors are treated as neural circuits linki[r]

see anger is heat, for example, as the product of the universal physiological cor-relation between the emotion and elevated skin temperature; but the humoral the-ory of emotions probably also played a role in the development, conventionali-zation, and elaboration of the pattern in Western languages.[r]

for replicating the nouns from the first colon in inverse grammatical slots in thesecond colon. Once available, such schemas can generate new and memorable ex-pressions. Ancient rhetoricians regarded these forms as more-or-less static tem-plates superimposed onto language.In addition to philosophy an[r]

2. The Diversity of ConstrualPhenomena One of the first construal operations to have been recognized as linguistically highlyrelevant is the ‘‘Figure/Ground’’ distinction, well known from studies in Gestaltpsychology. It was introduced into Cognitive Linguistics (even before it was know[r]

was one of the first scholars in Cognitive Linguistics to recognize the importanceof conceptual metonymy as a natural inference schema that underlies much ofpragmatic reasoning (see, e.g., Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing,withLindaThornburg, 2003). He is a member of the editorial boar[r]