Cognitive grammar
Table of contents
Cognitive grammar is a comprehensive and unified theory of linguistic structure. Its formulation was initiated in 1976, and a general description was first presented in Langacker (1982). Though refined and greatly elaborated, the basic organization and central notions of the theory have survived its application to diverse languages and progressively wider arrays of challenging data. Among the many topics on which book-length studies have now been completed are locatives in French (Vandeloise 1986) and Cora (Casad 1982); transitivity in English (Rice 1987); Samoan clause structure (Cook 1988); case semantics in German (Smith 1987) and Slavic (Janda 1993); modern Aramaic morphology (Rubba 1993); middle voice in Spanish (Maldonado 1992) and modern Greek (Manney 1993); and English pronominal anaphora (van Hoek 1992). Extensive discussion and exemplification of the framework are available in Langacker (1990) and Rudzka-Ostyn (1988), while Langacker (1987a, 1991) provide a detailed, systematic exposition.