Elementos de Gramática Cognitiva

Abstract

Cognitive Grammar (CG) is a model for representing linguistic knowledge that is characterized by treating this knowledge as a network of symbolic units (grammatical constructions), shaped by the speaker's linguistic experience and structured by means of cognitive skills, and by radically emphasizing the idea that linguistic form is conceptually motivated. The first property is common to all versions of Construction Grammar (CG), and the second is common to all cognitive-functional versions of CG, but the systematic and exhaustive treatment of meaning, from a conceptually based semantics, is, in the field of CG, a specificity of GCog. Despite being an extremely successful model, which has already shown itself capable of dealing with a myriad of different phenomena in different languages, GCog still has relatively few followers and few works presenting the theory - apart from those produced by its own founder. This is probably due to the undeniably sui generis nature of the model, which, at least in its notational system, differs significantly from other versions of CG. For the novice Brazilian reader, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that, until the release of this book, there was no introduction to the theory in Portuguese. This book therefore aims to begin to fill this gap. Naturally, it does not cover all the relevant GCog concepts. Nevertheless, it offers the Portuguese-speaking reader an accessible introduction, in Portuguese, to a significant set of notions central to the Langackerian approach.