This textbook is an accessible introduction to both English phonology and phonology in general. It analyzes some central phenomena of the sound system of two standard varieties of English, Southern British English and General American. The framework adopted is Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, and this entails in particular that all the elements of the sound system are tightly interwoven with the meaningful units: morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. The book contains chapters on articulatory phonetics, sounds and meaning, alternation patterns, word stress and intonation. Each chapter ends with an invitation to analyze English and other languages with the tools of Cognitive Linguistics. The book is designed for students as well as teachers of English and linguistics, and while the target readership should already have a background in linguistics, a beginner in phonology will find all the basic concepts clearly defined.

This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications.

This book is relevant for phonologists, morphologists, Slavists and cognitive linguists, and addresses two questions: How can the morphology-phonology interface be accommodated in cognitive linguistics? Do morphophonological alternations have a meaning? These questions are explored via a comprehensive analysis of stem alternations in Russian verbs. The analysis is couched in R.W. Langacker's Cognitive Grammar framework, and the book offers comparisons to other varieties of cognitive linguistics, such as Construction Grammar and Conceptual Integration. The proposed analysis is furthermore compared to rule-based and constraint-based approaches to phonology in generative grammar. Without resorting to underlying representations or procedural rules, the Cognitive Linguistics framework facilitates an insightful approach to abstract phonology, offering the important advantage of restrictiveness. Cognitive Grammar provides an analysis of an entire morphophonological system in terms of a parsimonious set of theoretical constructs that all have cognitive motivation. No ad hoc machinery is invoked, and the analysis yields strong empirical predictions. Another advantage is that Cognitive Grammar can identify the meaning of morphophonological alternations. For example, it is argued that stem alternations in Russian verbs conspire to signal non-past meaning. This book is accessible to a broad readership and offers a welcome contribution to phonology and morphology, which have been understudied in cognitive linguistics.

The chapters provide comprehensive surveys of the major subfields of Cognitive Linguistics. Apart from phonology, construction grammar and lexical semantics, the areas of language use, language acquisition and literary discourse are comprehensively presented.

In contexts of instructed second language acquisition there is a need for teaching methods that are optimally efficient, i.e. teaching interventions that generate a maximal return on learners' and teachers' investment of time and effort. In the past couple of decades, many researchers have argued that insights from Cognitive Linguistics (CL) - when suitably translated for pedagogical purposes - can make a major contribution to fostering such language teaching efficiency. This collective volume assesses and supplements those CL proposals. The first part of the book positions CL-inspired language pedagogy vis-à-vis recent trends in mainstream applied linguistics and illustrates through several case studies that language-focused instruction (including CL-inspired instruction) is a useful - if not indispensable - complement to learner-autonomous, incidental acquisition. The second part demonstrates how CL research can help pedagogues identify hitherto neglected language elements that merit explicit targeting in second language instruction. The third part consists of contributions that put the pedagogical efficiency of several CL-inspired interventions to the test in classroom experiments. Additions to the currently available armoury of teaching methods are proposed. The kinds of target language items under examination in the book range from single words over multiword units to grammar patterns. Throughout, the volume illustrates how much pedagogy-oriented Cognitive Linguistics has matured in recent years.

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

With 49 chapters written by experts in the field, this reference volume authoritatively covers cognitive linguistics, from basic concepts and models to practical applications.

In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change.

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.

This volume focuses on detailed studies of various aspects of Construction Morphology, and combines theoretical analysis and descriptive detail. It deals with data from several domains of linguistics and contributes to an integration of findings from various subdisciplines of linguistics into a common model of the architecture of language. It presents applications and extensions of the model of Construction Morphology to a wide range of languages. Construction Morphology is one of the theoretical paradigms in present-day morphology. It makes use of concepts of Construction Grammar for the analysis of word formation and inflection. Complex words are seen as constructions, that is, pairs of form and meaning. Morphological patterns are accounted for by construction schemas. These are the recipes for coining new words and word forms, and they motivate the properties of existing complex words. Both schemas and individual words are stored, and hence there is no strict separation of lexicon and grammar. In addition to abstract schemas there are subschemas for subclasses of complex words with specific properties. This architecture of the grammar is in harmony with findings from other empirical domains of linguistics such as language acquisition, word processing, and language change.