Brdar Mario, Raffaelli Ida, Žic Fuchs Milena (Editors). Cognitive Linguistics between Universality and Variation

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. — 453 p.The present volume contains a collection of contributions originally presented as keynote talks or as regular papers at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference Cognitive Linguistics between Universality and Variation, held in Dubrovnik (Croatia), 30 September–1 October, 2008. More than 50 scholars from Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Poland, Sweden, and the USA attended the conference.The participants were invited to focus on various points on the continuum in the cognitive linguistic agenda stretching from the study of the universal to the study of variation in space and time, between individual and society.
As it transpires from the contributions selected in this volume, it is impossible to disregard the methodological aspects of conceptual unification while tackling the universality vs. variation issue, i.e. while adopting usage-based and constructional approaches to linguistic phenomena, doing cognitive corpus linguistics, cognitive contrastive linguistics, cognitive sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, or diachronic cognitive linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts, roughly mirroring the methodological access points in addressing universality and variation.
Part 1, Constructional Approaches to Grammatical Phenomena, deals with various grammatical phenomena in English and Croatian, discussed
within the model of Cognitive Grammar or the Lexical-Constructional Model.
Part 2, Constructing Meaning (Between Grammar and Lexicon), contains four chapters dealing with phenomena of form-meaning pairings, such as synonymy or antonymy, or idiomatic expressions.
The five chapters that make up Part III are concerned with the phenomena of interlinguistic and intercultural variation.
The volume is rounded off by Part IV with two chapters assuming a diachronic perspective.