Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse

Reviews / Votes

Literary texts and political texts are so divergent that it seems unrealistic to bring them under one roof. The scholarly disciplines related to the two sets of texts, stylistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA), respectively, are traditionally known to be divergent. This volume successfully brings the two fields together under the umbrella of cognitive linguistics (CL), which provides 'the common toolkit for close, linguistically motivated, textual analysis' (p. 6)... In this volume, 'cognitive linguistic approaches' is rather broad and all-encompassing. Three strands of theory are adopted in the studies... Although these theories vary in their contents and focus, they share in common the basic CL tenet: Language is experiential and embodied. The chapters in this volume are committed to the general principles of CL to account for processes of meaning construction in texts and discourse. The volume also helps refine and extend CL theories by contributing new insights into the workings of linguistic concepts like metaphor, transitivity or event-structure, viewpoint, deixis and other attentional or perspectival phenomena. -- Hongwei Zhan, Hangzhou Normal University, P.R. China * Discourse Studies * Written by top scholars in cognitive stylistics, poetics, and critical discourse analysis, this groundbreaking collection shows the true breadth and potential of a 'usage-based' framework. -- Professor Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia