This new addition to Routledge's Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, brings together the very best and most influential scholarly research on cognitive linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics is a broad approach to language that places psychological reality at the top of the list of theoretical desiderata. Both experimental and theoretical work will be included in each volume. The fact that language is a system of communication is emphasized, so that explanations that rely on the functions of linguistic elements are preferred over purely syntactic accounts. The label, "Cognitive Linguistics," arose in the 1980s with Langacker, Lakoff, Fillmore, and Talmy laying the semantic/pragmatic foundations for the approach. Volume I will be dedicated to key works by these authors and others. Volume II further explores semantic foundations with papers on metaphor, blending and embodiment. Cognitive Linguistics encompasses approaches to phonology, morphology, grammar, and discourse, but the emphasis has been on morphology and grammar. Work has coalesced around the idea that form-function pairings (constructions, schemata) are the basic units of language. Volumes III and IV include seminal works in this area. A strength of Cognitive Linguistics is that it interfaces naturally with a great deal of work in language acquisition, language evolution, and language change. Selected papers from these topics that make explicit use of key ideas in Cognitive Linguistics will be included in Volume V. With a new introduction by the editor and a comprehensive index, this five volume collection will be a convenient and authoritative reference resource on cognitive linguistics for both student and scholar.

This book investigates the nature of generalization in language and examines how language is known by adults and acquired by children. It looks at how and why constructions are learned, the relation between their forms and functions, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations about them can be explained.
Constructions at Work is divided into three parts: in the first Professor Goldberg provides an overview of constructionist approaches, including the constructionist approach to argument structure, and argues for a usage-based model of grammar. In Part II she addresses issues concerning how generalizations are constrained and constructional generalizations are learned. In Part III the author shows that a combination of function and processing accounts for a wide range of language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations. She then considers the degree to which the function of constructions explains their distribution and examines cross-linguistic tendencies in argument realization. She demonstrates that pragmatic and cognitive processes account for the data without appeal to stipulations that are language-specific.
This book is an important contribution to the study of how language operates in the mind and in the world and how these operations relate. It is of central interest for scholars and graduate-level students in all branches of theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. It will also appeal to cognitive scientists and philosophers concerned with language and its acquisition.