Langacker Ronald W. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar

Монография. Berlin– New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. — 396 pages. ISBN: 978-3-11-021434-5In its general outline, Cognitive Grammar (CG) has been in existence for roughly three decades. Over this span of time it has not changed in any fundamental way. It has of course been subject to refinement and elaboration. Still, its continued evolution has mostly been a matter of working out the specifics of its application to varied linguistic phenomena. In a symbolic account of grammar, the key problem is to characterize the semantic structures it incorporates and serves to express. Progress in CG has therefore come about primarily through detailed conceptual analysis in numerous domains, requiring no substantial modification of the basic descriptive framework. Reports of this progress are scattered in many venues often not readily accessible.
The need to make them easily available was accommodated by two previous volumes in this series (Langacker 1990a, 1999a) and has now resulted in a third. The present volume brings together a dozen innovative papers reflecting recent work. Although they were first written independently, and pertain to diverse topics, they have been revised and integrated to form a coherent whole. And while they deal with important grammatical problems in considerable depth and analytical detail, the presentation builds from fundamentals and introduces the background needed for comprehension.
One source of the volume’s coherence is that a number of overlapping topics are examined in multiple chapters viewing them from different perspectives and in relation to one another. Among the topics covered in this fashion are grammatical constructions (their general nature, their metonymic basis, their role in grammaticization), nominal grounding (quantifiers, possessives, impersonal it), clausal grounding (its relation to nominal grounding, an epistemic account of tense, a systemic view of the English auxiliary), the control cycle (an abstract cognitive model with many linguistic manifestations), finite clauses (their internal structure and external grammar), and complex sentences (complementation, subordination, coordination). Though necessarily selective, the book thus provides a reasonably comprehensive survey of current research in CG and gives some indication of its future directions.Constructions in Cognitive Grammar
Metonymy in grammar
A Constructional approach to grammaticization
Possession, location, and existence
On the subject of impersonals
Enunciating the parallelism of nominal and clausal grounding
The English present: Temporal coincidence vs, epistemic immediacy
A functional account of the English auxiliary
Aspects of the grammar of finite clauses
Finite complements in English
Subordination in Cognitive Grammar
The conceptual basis of coordinationAuthor index
Subject index