What do speakers of a language have to know, and what can they 'figure out' on the basis of that knowledge, in order for them to use their language successfully? This is the question at the heart of Construction Grammar, an approach to the study of language that views all dimensions of language as equal contributors to shaping linguistic expressions. The trademark characteristic of Construction Grammar is the insight that language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – construc...

Constructions are long-term pairings in memory of form and meaning. How are they created and learned, how do they change, and how do they combine into new utterances (constructs, communicative performances) in working memory? Drawing on evidence from word-formation (blending, Noun-Noun-compounds) over idioms and argument structure constructions to multimodal communication, we argue that computational metaphors such as 'unification' or 'constraint-satisfaction' do not constitute a cognitive...

AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and especially the Frame Semanticist. An AI LLM chatbot is a text-generation system trained on vast amounts of text. To generate text, it must be able to find patterns in the data and mimic some linguistic capacity, at least in the eyes of a cooperative...

Varieties of English are spoken all over the world from Africa to Asia, from Europe to America. In addition to its use as a foreign language, English in many of these countries is a first or second language variety that initially arose in a colonial setting. Currently, the most influential sociolinguistic model for the evolution of these 'Post-Colonial Englishes' is the Dynamic Model. In this Element, I outline how Construction Grammar, the most prominent cognitive syntactic theory, can pr...

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s support for military insurgency in eastern Ukraine undermined two decades of cooperation between Russia and the EU leaving both sides in a situation of reciprocal economic sanctions and political alienation. What is left of previous positive experiences and mutually beneficial interactions between the two parties? And, what new communication practices and strategies might Russia and Europe use?Previously coherent and institutionalized s...

One of the most intriguing features of languages is that speakers can produce novel grammatical utterances that they have never heard before. Consequently, most linguists agree that the mental grammars of speakers are complex systems that must be more abstract than the input they are exposed to. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract speakers' mental representations have to be to allow this grammatical creativity. This book addresses this issue by empirically investigating on...

This volume deals with the so-called new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their interrelationship with Muslims and the interpretation of Islam. This volume taps into what has been labelled Media Studies 2.0, which has been characterized by an intensified focus on everyday meanings and ‘lay’ users – in contrast to earlier emphases on experts or self-acclaimed experts. This lay adoption of ICT and the subsequent digital ‘literacy’ is not least noticeable among Muslim comm...

This book explores both the possibilities and limits of arguments from human nature in the context of human rights. Can the concept of human nature provide a basis for understanding fundamental rights? Is it plausible to justify the claim to universal validity of human rights by reference to human nature? Or does the idea of human rights in its modern, post-1945 manifestation go, in essence, beyond human nature? The essays in this volume introduce naturalistic positions and their concomita...

Preposition placement, the competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?), is one of the most interesting areas of syntactic variation in English. This is the first book to investigate preposition placement across all types of clauses that license it, such as questions, exclamations and wh-clauses, and those which exhibit categorical stranding, such as non-wh relative clauses, comparatives, and passives. Drawing on over 100...

An integrative approach to human cognition that encompasses the domains of language, consciousness, action, social cognition, and theory of mind that will foster cross-disciplinary conversation among linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists.Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be o...

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and constr...

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. The first twenty chapters give readers the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of the fundamental analytic concepts and descriptive models of Cognitive Linguistics and their background. The book starts with a set of chapters discussing di...