A curious thing happened to me recently. I was revisited by a graduate student from the linguistics department who had taken my course in cognitive linguistics six years ago. The son of a famous German linguist, with all the benefits of both European and American educations, this young man was unusually erudite and a pleasure in class because of the comparisons he could draw among linguistic tr...

Cognitive linguistics brought about changes starting from reshaping our approach to metaphors. Our bodily experience in space serves as the basis for the majority of metaphorical expressions and the present article focuses on some of the English, Romanian and Hungarian prepositions/verbal prefixes, such as over, peste, túl, végig. Their basic meaning(s) can be more easily understood resorting t...

Cognitive linguistics gives the most inclusive, consistent description of how language is organized, used and learned to date. Cognitive linguistics contains a great number of concepts that are useful to second language learners.  If-clauses in English, on the other hand, remain intriguing for foreign language learners to struggle with, due to their intrinsic intricacies. EFL grammar books are ...

The impact of corpora is easily observable in Linguistics: it has changed the way we understand language use. However, despite their potential for impact in society, the use of corpora inside and outside the university settings in Northeast Brazil is still restricted. Rather than compiling another research corpus, the present project aims at engaging several educational communities in the use o...

Mediation of Cohesive Clues in Simultaneous Interpreting: A Perspective of Interactive Embodiment and Mental Coherence Gao Wei Heriot-Watt University Abstract Based on interactive embodiment and mental coherence of cognitive linguistics (CL) (Lakoff1987, 1999; Langacker 2000, Zwaan2000, Wang Yin 2006) and also Relevance Theory (RT) (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995), this paper aims to reveal how ...

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 co...

Different from traditional linguistics which views metaphor as a means of rhetoric, cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor, instead of being a deviant phenomenon of normal language, is a way of thought and a powerful instrument of cognition. Because of the reason that the traditional linguistics failed to explain the essence of metaphor, the modern linguists began to do research on it from t...