Landmark publications by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson in 1987 established image schemas among the cornerstone concepts of the emerging paradigm of Cognitive Linguistics. The pre-linguistic, dynamic and highly schematic gestalt patterns arising from motor movement, object manipulation, and perceptual interaction were posited as the cognitive anchors linking abstract reasoning and imagination to bodily experience. Ever since its introduction, the notion has inspired much research and debate on diverse issues from the meaning, structure and acquisition of natural languages to the...

The volume brings together seventeen previously published articles on lexical and semantic topics by one of the most influential authors in cognitive linguistic lexicology. Spanning the period from the late 1980s to recent years, the collection features a number of papers that may be considered classics. The book serves as an excellent introduction to the field.

Key Features:

• Excellent introduction to the field
• Includes papers from the late 1980s to recent years that may be considered as classics

Over the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has grown to be one of the most broadly appealing and dynamic frameworks for the study of natural language. Essentially, this new school of linguistics focuses on the meaning side of language: linguistic form is analysed as an expression of meaning. And meaning itself is not something that exists in isolation, but it is integrated with the full spectrum of human experience: the fact that we are embodied beings just as much as the fact that we are cultural beings.

Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings brings together twelve...

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

The monograph investigates the relationship between form and meaning in different domains and centers on a group of methods referred to as "linguistic profiles" that have been developed recently by researchers at the University of Tromso. These methods are based on the observation that there is a strong correlation between semantic and distributional properties of linguistic units. This book discusses grammatical, semantic, constructional, collostructional and diachronic profiles.

Linguistic profiles as a group of methods are based on recent developments in the area of...

This book explores relationships between pairs of signs in terms of their form, meaning and context. It shows that many relationships among linguistic units such as synonymy, polysemy and allomorphy can be seen as parts of a single semiotic system. The authors use the term fingerprinting because comparing two constructions is similar to determining whether one fingerprint is similar to another.

This volume explores the cross-linguistic diversity, and possibly inconsistency, of the span of linguistic means that signal reported speech and thought. The integration of broad linguistic (viewpoint in conversation and narrative) and cognitive (theory of mind and understanding the inner life and thought of others) strategies for handling mixed points of view will be considered.