Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume II: Descriptive Application

This is the second volume of a two-volume work that introduces a new and fundamentally different conception of language structure and linguistic investigation. The central claim of cognitive grammar is that grammar forms a continuum with lexicon and is fully describable in terms of symbolic units (i.e. form-meaning pairings). In contrast to current orthodoxy, the author argues that grammar is not autonomous with respect to semantics, but rather reduces to patterns for the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content. This volume suggests how to use the theoretical tools presented in Volume I, applying cognitive grammar to a broad array of representative grammatical phenomena, primarily (but by no means exclusively) drawn from English.