Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

After a brief account of the salient characteristics of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, this chapter highlights the distinctive perspective which this approach offers on traditional topics in the description of English, including the question of word classes, the nature of syntactic relations, and the status of constructions as an alternative to rule-based accounts of linguistic knowledge. It presents three case studies illustrating the role of background cognition, not only as a factor in semantic interpretation but also for its grammatical effects. These concern (i) the role of grounding in nominal and verbal systems, (ii) some of the manifestations of cognitive reference points in such diverse areas as possessive expressions and constraints on the use of participles, and (iii) processes of subjectification, as exemplified in such areas as modals, fictive motion, and causal relations.

Keywords: Cognitive Grammar, word classes, constructions, grounding, possessives, participles, modals, fictive motion, causal relations

John R Taylor

John R Taylor (PhD 1979) is senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Otago, New Zealand; previously he was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of Trier, Germany. His interest in Cognitive Linguistics dates from the 1980s, when, after having completed his doctoral thesis on acoustic phonetics, he chanced upon a preprint of some chapters of Langacker's Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. He is author of Linguistic Categorization (1989; 2nd ed., 1995; 3rd rev. ed., 2003; and translated into Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Polish), Possessives in English (1996), and Cognitive Grammar (which appeared in 2003 in the Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics series). He has also coedited two volumes: Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (with Robert MacLaury, 1996) and Current Approaches to Lexical Semantics (with Hubert Cuyckens and René Dirven, 2003). Since 1996, he has been one of the editors (alongside Ronald Langacker and René Dirven) of the series Cognitive Linguistics Research, published by Mouton de Gruyter. His main research interests are lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and phonetics/phonology in a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. John R Taylor can be reached at john.taylor@stonebow.otago.ac.nz.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.