The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 43. 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. | 390 MARK TURNER one more yard and scores. Blending these two spaces gives us a blended space in which there is now an element that is absence of one more yard of progress . We might express this blend by making the negative element explicit The Rams won by stopping the Titans from advancing one more yard. But the front-page headline was in fact Rams win by a yard. It then becomes possible to refer to the Rams one-yard win . One-yard win is then identical in its integration patterns with caffeine headache. In fact this example reveals something else. The more conventional pattern for expressions like winning by a yard and winning by a nose is of course that of a race where the winner crosses the finish line a yard ahead of the runner-up. This does not feel intuitively like a counterfactual expression it seems as if we can see that fateful yard right there on the photograph of the finish. But if you think twice you can see that this more standard notion of a one-yard win is really also counterfactual. The crucial yard is the one that the loser failed to cover just as the crucial yard in the Super Bowl win was the yard that separated the ball carrier from the goal line. The central problem of language the one that must be solved if human language is to emerge is that relatively few linguistic patterns such as words syntactic patterns and suprasegmental patterns must be applicable to vast ranges of conceptual structure. Language must be available to be used in any and every situation. Human language has this property of being equipotential for any situation real or imaginary there is always a way to use language to express thoughts about that situation. A word like food or there for example must apply very widely if it is to do its job. The same is true of grammatical patterns independent of the words we put in them. Take the resultative construction in English which has the form A Verb B Adjective where the Adjective denotes a property C see Goldberg 1995 . It means A
