The article divided into five parts with 16 chapters, each of which has an introduction and a summary. This helps readers have a quick look at the main content of the chapter and find the parts appealing to them. | INFORMATION HOW WORDS MEAN: LEXICAL CONCEPTS, COGNITIVE MODELS, AND MEANING CONSTRUCTION Vyvyan Evans Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. xv+377 Do Tuan Long* Department of Language Training and Professional Development, VNU University of Languages and International Studies, Pham Van Dong, Cau Giay, Hanoi, Vietnam The book “How Words Mean” by V. Evans (published in 2009 by Oxford University Press) is a great achievement with lots of principles and approaches integrated in order to deal with a number of long standing and largely unsolved issues of lexical semantics. In this book, the author tries to integrate different cognitive approaches to grammar and semantics. Basically, ideas presented by other researchers such as Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999), Langacker (1987), Croft (2002), Goldberg (2006) and others are presented, and Evans then carefully and diligently presents those theories and integrates them into his personal conclusions, while adding new aspects. The theory is termed the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM for short). The book is divided into five parts with 16 chapters, each of which has an introduction and a summary. This helps readers have a quick look at the main content of the chapter and find the parts appealing to them. 1. Introduction Chapter 1 lays the starting points for the book. Evans introduces the received view of word meaning, which he calls literalism and then criticizes it. The clear distinction between pragmatics and semantics causes the assumption that word meanings are stable and relatively delimited “atoms of meaning” which are context-independent. Instead, Evans argues that word meaning is variable in language use due to both encyclopedic knowledge and context of use. The second part of the book is for presenting lexical representation in LCCM. * Tel.: 84-985227867 Email: tuanlongcfl@ According to Evans, LCCM theory has a number of primary commitments: • Lexical representations are points .
