Cognitive Linguistics: Convergence and Expansion. Human Cognitive

This volume offers a superb collection of fourteen articles on a wide range of interrelated topics within cognitive linguistics. Living fully up to its ambitious title, the book is based upon the keynote talks and papers presented at the “Converging and Diverging Tendencies in Cognitive Linguistics” conference, held in Dubrovnik (Croatia) in 2005, as well as a couple of papers that have been commissioned specifically for the present volume. Therefore, the six years that have elapsed between the conference and the publication of the book was definitively worth the wait, as the editors have managed to compile a volume that provides an excellent snapshot of where cognitive linguistics is right now, but at the same time also offers a glimpse into what the future might hold for cognitive linguistic research. One of the main characteristics of the research paradigm that we now call “cognitive linguistics” is that it is not a unified theory of language, and it never has been. It started off as a number of diverse researches that went against prevailing generativist theories, namely the primacy of syntax and the modularity of language. These alternative inquiries slowly developed into a school of thought united under the banner of the primacy of meaning, non– modularism and embodiment. Nevertheless, this unification never entailed agreement on all linguistic matters, although the search for consensus on various aspects of cognitive linguistic theory and research has always been on the agenda. In fact, a number of publications have appeared in the past few years which bear witness to the convergence of ideas within cognitive linguistics. On a theoretical level, one can cite Kövecses’ (2010) monograph on conceptual metaphor, which aims to establish a unified account of metaphor by drawing on the latest developments in the field, or Benczes et al.’s (2011) volume that seeks to delimit the notion of conceptual metonymy. There are plenty of examples of convergence on the empirical level, too. See, for instance, the Pragglejaz Group’s (2007) attempts at establishing an across–the–board framework for metaphor identification, or Gonzalez–Marquez et al.’s (2007) outline of empirical methods for cognitive linguistic research. At the same time, convergence within cognitive linguistics has also gone hand–in–hand with divergence. Grammar, for instance, has been approached from a number of different, yet parallel perspectives, resulting in approa-