The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 22. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 180 ALAN CIENKI may stand for an institution or people located at that place. The ICM provides the framework for allowing one to make metonymic reference in that it provides a limited search domain which the addressee can use to identify the metonymic referent. Social stereotypes are one example of how certain salient members of a category can be used to represent the entire category part stands for whole with the inherent danger that inferences can be made about the entire category of people based on the characteristics associated with the one subgroup. . Symbolic ICMs The association of symbolic units such as linguistic forms with the conceptual elements in ICMs is the criterion for identifying an ICM as symbolic Lakoff 1987 289-92 . In terms of linguistic form our understanding of what constitutes a lexical item a grammatical category and a grammatical construction is claimed to be structured by ICMs. So the concept of noun is a radial category based on the central prototypical subcategory of names for physical entities. But ICMs are also relevant in terms of the connection between symbol linguistic form and meaning. Lakoff also draws on the Figure Ground distinction and recasts the findings of Fillmore s work on frame semantics to say that the meaning of each lexical item is represented as an element in an ICM or conversely an ICM provides the background against which a word is defined. . ICMs Closing Points ICMs have been used as analytic tools in research on lexical and morphological semantics polysemy particularly of prepositions verb particles and verbal prefixes and the syntax and semantics of grammatical constructions. The three case studies in Lakoff 1987 give a sense of this work. One is a semantic analysis of over as a preposition and verb particle developing on Brugman 1981 one provides a coherent account of English constructions with there which sometimes refer to relative location and sometimes to existence and this analysis invokes the work .
