Taylor John R. Cognitive Grammar

Oxford University Press, 2003. — xii, 621. — ISBN: 0-19-870033-4.This book started life, several years ago, as a short introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. The aim was to offer a compact synthesis of the leading ideas of the main protagonists of Cognitive Linguistics: Lakoff, Langacker, Talmy, Fauconnier, and others.As the project matured, the focus narrowed to a specific trend within Cognitive Linguistics, namely, Langacker's theory of Cognitive Grammar, to my mind, the most comprehensive, and most fully articulated statement of a Cognitive Linguistics approach. With a narrowing of the focus, the book also grew in size. It soon became apparent that it was not going to be possible to convey the scope and internal consistency of the theory in half a dozen chapters. I also decided early on that it was going to be necessary to address the basic assumptions of the theory, and to show how the theory follows naturally from these. Hence, a good deal of this book deals with methodological and foundational issues. A particular concern was to do justice to phonological and morphological structure, topics which are largely ignored in more semantics-focused approaches within Cognitive LinguisticsIn spite of its length, the book still retains its introductory character. Although the ‘ideal' reader will have had some exposure to the methodology and subject matter of modem linguistics, as well as, perhaps, to its theoretical controversies, the book does not presuppose any previous knowledge of the discipline. With this readership in mind, I have endeavored to present the
main issues in Cognitive Grammar, exemplifying them, mostly, on the basis of well-known data, usually from English. I am acutely aware of the many topics that could not be included, such as discourse and textual aspects, the application of the theory to languages other than English, as well as more in-depth analyses of the thornier issues in English.