The overarching concern of the seminar will be with linguistic meaning and interpretation. We will use the excellent new text by Croft and Cruse to examine cognitive linguistic treatments of categoration, lexical semantics, metaphor, construction grammar, and language change. We will then pursue issues of corpus and collocation further with Stubbs' book. There will be some practice using electronic corpora and analytic tools. Topics for the seminar paper can range from an application of these tools to address particular texts or issues to critical examinations of the theories and ideas presented.

Texts:
William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, 2004)
Michael Stubbs, Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics (Blackwell, 2001)