The volume presents an overview of recent cognitive linguistic research on Slavic languages. Slavic languages, with their rich inflectional morphology in both the nominal and the verbal system, provide an important testing ground for a linguistic theory that seeks to motivate linguistic structure.

Therefore, the volume touches upon a wide range of phenomena: it addresses issues related to the semantics of grammatical case, tense, aspect, voice and word order, it looks into grammaticalization and language change and discusses sound symbolism. At the same time, the analyses presented...

Given that we lack sensory-motor experience for abstract concepts, how do we find out what they mean? How far can we get by tracking frequency distributions in input? The volume tackles the question of what language has to offer the language learner in his/her quest for meaning, and explicitly addresses how semantic knowledge may be distributed along the continuum from "grammar" to "lexicon." Focus is on the synonymy of constructions and lexemes, a meaning relation that has been largely ignored in Western linguistics.

Frequency in all its guises plays a major part in this book....