Kopecka Cognitive Linguistics by W . Croft and D . a . Cruse

The notion of cognitive linguistics first appeared in the 1970's, largely as a response to the shortcomings of truth-conditional semantics and generative grammar. Since then it has attracted the interest of a number of scholars, giving rise to a complex discipline encompassing the study of semantics, syntax, morphology, as well as reaching other disciplines of linguistic investigations, such as language acquisition, phonology, morphology, semantics and various fields of historical linguistics. Croft and Cruse's (2004) recent publication is aimed to be a comprehensive work providing an overall synthesis of studies within the cognitive framework of language analysis. In fact, the book reviewed here, being an introduction to the cognitive linguistic approach to language, is primarily aimed at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, to serve as a textbook for a course in cognitive linguistics. The body of the book is divided into three main parts, which in turn consist of twelve chapters. Part I serves to outline the key concepts and tools underlying the cognitive spirit of the linguistic approach. In the remaining two parts, these principles are expanded and elaborated upon, and further illustrated with their application to semantic aspects in Part II, and to grammar in Part III. Additionally, it is worth stressing that this publication contains author and subject indexes appended to the main text, which is undoubtedly an advantage given the book's primary audience. To be more specific, Part I of the book reviewed concentrates on the presentation of the assumptions underlying the conceptual approach to linguistic analysis. Chapter 1, in the form of an introduction, briefly defines cognitive linguistics by listing the following main hypotheses, which are later developed and justified throughout the text of the book: 1) Language is not an autonomous cognitive faculty; 2) Grammar is conceptualisation; 3) Knowledge of languages emerges from language use.