Grammar And Conceptualization

Grammar and Conceptualization documents some major developments in the theory of cognitive grammar during the last decade. By further articulating the framework and showing its application to numerous domains of linguistic structure, this book substantiates the claim that lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a gradation consisting of assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings).

To what extent is conceptualisation based on linguistic representation? And to what extent is it variable across cultures, communities or even individuals? Of crucial importance in the attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of human cognition, these remain amongst the most difficult of questions in the cognitive sciences. This volume brings together ten new contributions from leading scholars working in a wide cross-section of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology and philosophy.

"This volume makes accessible a substantial range of recent research in Cognitive Grammar. Building from fundamentals, it brings fresh insight to the analysis of varied grammatical phenomena. Topics considered in depth include constructions, grounding, clause strucutre, and complex sentences. The book is of interest to anyone concerned with the conceptual basis of meaning and linguistic structure." --Book Jacket.

Bringing together evidence from natural and social sciences, the work introduces the non-reductionist Instruction Grammar programme. Viewed from within the practicalities of the lifeworld, utterances are described as instructions to simulate perceptions and attributions for action. The approach provides solutions to long-standing philosophical problems of cognitive grammar theories and traditionally puzzling syntactic phenomena.

The book offers a basic introduction to the theory of Cognitive Grammar, which claims that meaning resides in conceptualization, and that grammar is inherently meaningful, residing in the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content.

Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. This type of reasoning is at the center of daily operations, as decision-making, risk preventability or blame assignment. More generally, non-factual scenarios have been defined as a crucial ingredient of desire and modern love. If the areas covered by this reasoning are so varied, the L2 learner will be led to express 'what might have been' at some point of her acquisitional itinerary. How is this reasoning expressed in French, Spanish and Italian? By the use of what lexical, syntactic and grammatical devices? Will the learner combine these devices as the native French speakers do? What are the L1 features likely to fossilize in the L2 grammar? What are the information principles governing a communicative task based on the production of counterfactual scenarios? These are some of the questions addressed by the present volume.

This book provides a re-conceptualization of grammar in a period of change in the communication landscape and widening disciplinary knowledge. Drawing on resources in systemic functional linguistics, the book envisions a ‘functional grammatics’ relevant to disciplinary domains such as literary study, rhetoric and multimodality. It re-imagines the possibilities of grammar for school English through Halliday’s notion of grammatics. Functional Grammatics is founded on decades of research inspired by systemic functional linguistics, and includes studies of grammatical tools useful to teachers of English, research into visual and multimodal literacies and studies of the genre–grammar connection. It aims to be useful to the interpretation and composition of texts in school English, portable in design across texts and contexts and beneficial for language development. The book will be of interest to researchers and teacher educators, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students and practicing teachers committed to evidence-based professional development.

The papers of this volume investigate how grammar codes the subjective viewpoint of human language users, that is, how grammar reflects human conceptualization. Some of the articles deal with spatial relations and locations. They discuss how basic attributes of human conceptualization are encoded in the grammatical expression of spatial relations. Other articles concern embodiment in language, showing how conceptualization is mediated by one's embodied experience of the world and ourselves. Finally, some of the articles discuss coding of person focusing on the subjec­tivity of conceptualization and how it is reflected in grammar. The articles show that conceptualization reflects the speaker's construal of the situation, and furthermore, that it is intersubjective because it reflects the speaker's understanding of the relations between the speech act participants. The papers deal with Finnish, utilizing the rich resources of Finnish grammar to contribute to issues in contemporary linguistics and in particular to Cognitive Grammar.