The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists
towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction
with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad
variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent
linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the
connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and
discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book
attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus
expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL
community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections
from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself.
CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with
extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse,
pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently
been taken into account in this orientation.
The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the
embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii)
the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as
generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and
scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural
models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and
cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of
mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work
in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and
consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions
therein.