Cognitive foundations of linguistic usage patterns

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This volume offers a collection of methodologically sensitive contributions that provide enthusiastic, and at times critical, support for the cognitive-linguistic enterprise. It plays a significant role in advancing cognitive linguistics by showcasing its ambition to evolve into a set of testable linguistic approaches, thereby enhancing our understanding of language. The book covers a wide array of linguistic phenomena, including individual concepts, semantic issues like vagueness and polysemy, grammatical aspects such as gender and tense, as well as collocations, constructions, and speech acts. It examines languages like English, German, Dutch, Polish, and Italian. A common thread among the contributions is the effort to connect observed linguistic patterns with established cognitive linguistic concepts and models, all grounded in empirical research and sound methodology. The phenomena studied range from lexico-conceptual and collocational levels to grammatical categories and functions. The volume features two complementary perspectives: one employs psycholinguistic experimentation, quantitative corpus analysis, and computational simulation to validate cognitive-linguistic theories, while the other tests established theories against authentic data to assess their applicability. Additionally, some contributions critically engage with reductionist cognitive thinking. This volume is relevant for cognitive linguists, psycholingui