In this book, Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer present thirty-five
original essays bringing together work at the crossroads of
linguistics, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and related
fields. These contributions apply a range of methodologies and
perspectives to the problem of the relation of language to human
culture and cognition, with an emphasis on how language is produced
and understood in context. Topics considered include human
categorization, cognitive and cultural models, embodiment,
and the experiential basis of categories and conceptual structures,
lexical and constructional semantics, and the distribution and formal
properties of linguistic elements and constructions in a wide
variety of languages.
Some perspectives and methodologies represented among the
papers are corpus-based methodologies, discourse analysis, language
acquisition, contrastive analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation,
and language change and grammaticalization. Some
theoretical frameworks deployed in the various analyses are Cognitive
Grammar, Construction Grammar, Metaphor theory, and
Mental Space and Blending Theory.
Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer are professors of linguistics
at Rice University.
