Tissari Review of Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical " prototype " of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.

Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.

Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics publishes the keynote lectures series given by prominent international scholars at the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics since 2004. Each volume contains the transcripts of 10 lectures under one theme given by an acknowledged expert on a subject and readers have access to the audio recordings of the lectures through links in the e-book and QR codes in the printed volume. This series provides a unique course on the broad subject of Cognitive Linguistics. Speakers include George Lakoff, Ronald Note on Supplementary Material All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material such as any handouts and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via a QR code for the print version of this book, in the e-book both the QR code and dynamic links will be available which can be accessed by a mouse-click. The material can be accessed on figshare.com through a PC internet browser or via mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. To listen to the audiorecording on hand-held devices, the QR code that appears at the beginning of each chapter should be scanned with a smart phone or tablet. A QR reader/ scanner and audio player should be installed on these devices. Alternatively, for the e-book version, one can simply click on the QR code provided to be redirected to the appropriate website. This book has been made with the intent that the book and the audio are both available and usable as separate entities. Both are complemented by the availability of the actual files of the presentations and material provided as handouts at the time these lectures have been given. All rights and permission remain with the authors of the respective works, the audio-recording and supplementary material are made available in Open Access via a CC-BY-NC license and are reproduced with kind permission from the authors. The recordings are courtesy of the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (http://cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/), funded by the Beihang University Grant for International Outstanding Scholars. The complete collection of lectures by Ronald W. Langacker can be accessed through scanning this QR code.

All the papers in this special section address issues central to cognitive linguistics research: usage-based models with their focus on frequency; multi-word units and the relationship between lexical and grammatical knowledge; and the nature of lexical meaning, especially construal or "thinking for speaking". Cognitive Linguistics is thus clearly a useful paradigm for L2 research. The contributors also emphasise that many of the processes operating in L1 acquisition are relevant in L2A as well. In this paper, I discuss the opposite side of the coin: how cognitively-inspired L2 research can inform work on first language learning and theoretical linguistics, focussing in particular on three issues that have been extensively studied in an L2 context but neglected by the other language sciences: transfer of knowledge between constructions, the role of explicit learning, and individual differences in linguistic knowledge.

For the purpose of this chapter, 'cognitive linguistics' refers to the movement initiated in the 1980s by, amongst others, Lakoff and Langacker. The chapter surveys the implications for the study of language of the predominately empiricist stance adopted by cognitive linguists in contrast to the rationalism of the Chomskyan approach. After a summary of the contributions of Lakoff and Langacker, the chapter addresses two recent trends in cognitive linguistic researchthe focus on constructions and the role of corpus-based data in assessing the usage-basis of linguistic knowledge.

Cognitive linguistics can offer an account not only of linguistic structure but also of a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. The comprehensive account presented in this paper is crucially based and dependent on cognitive capacities that human understanders and producers of language possess quite independently of their ability to use language. By discussing the cognitive processes and the various linguistic, social and cultural issues they help us describe and explain, the author demonstrates that cognitive linguistics is far more than a theory of language; one can think of it as a theory of " meaning-making " in general in its innumerable linguistic, social and cultural facets.

Cognitive linguistics is one of the fastest growing and influential perspectives on the nature of language, the mind, and their relationship with sociophysical (embodied) experience. It is a broad theoretical and methodological enterprise, rather than a single, closely articulated theory. Its primary commitments are outlined. These are the Cognitive Commitment-a commitment to providing a characterization of language that accords with what is known about the mind and brain from other disciplines-and the Generalization Commitment-which represents a dedication to characterizing general principles that apply to all aspects of human language. The article also outlines the assumptions and worldview which arises from these commitments, as represented in the work of leading cognitive linguists.

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association