Textual Choices in Discourse

“This innovative volume provides a wealth of illuminating insights into how to apply cognitive linguistic theories to many different discourse genres. The editors have strong reputations in this area and bring together an impressive array of articles from well-known and emerging authors. This valuable collection is full of thought-provoking and challenging ideas, covering an exceptionally wide range of text types including poetry, drama, narrative, print and radio journalism, popular science, political writing and lectures.”

“This collection succeeds in achieving its goal of offering ‘a better understanding of genre differences’ and ‘a clearer appreciation of the applicability of the cognitive framework now in use’ (185). On the one hand, it opens a new window to discourse genres from the perspective of CL, either by proposing a unified model (e.g. Mike Borkent’s article), or by borrowing notions that are considered to belong to a broadly conceived CL (e.g. joint attention). On the other hand, it contributes to CL by ‘expanding the range of facts to be explained’ and making CL reach ‘beyond the traditionally conceived boundaries of linguistic inquiry’ (1). Moreover, some researchers pose new challenges for CL. For instance, Dancygier argues that poetic discourse challenges some claims of constructional grammar (40), and Semino warns that blending theory needs to pay greater attention to interpretative variability and genre differences (112). Overall, this book shows the cross-fertilization between CL and discourse analysis, and is a great resource for anyone interested in these areas.”