The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 68. 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. | 640 LAURA JANDA a universal list. According to Slobin 1997 308 Anything that is important and salient enough for people to want to refer to it routinely and automatically most of the time and across a wide range of situations can come to be grammatically marked. Given this wide semantic range Slobin attacks the questions of innateness and universality and does so in a manner consistent with the cognitive linguistic notions of grounding and embodiment. Since inflectional categories indicate relations they are necessarily both engendered and acquired through interactive experiences. And whereas other linguistic items might be introduced by individuals or groups it takes an entire linguistic community to forge the categories of inflection. In addition to being relative the meanings of inflectional categories are necessarily participatory for they must interact with the meanings of the lexical items they are attached to as well as with other elements in the constructions where they appear other lexical items and functors such as pre- and postpositions . Because inflectional categories express their meanings only in the context of constructions it can be hard to determine what portion of grammatical meaning is borne by inflectional morphemes and what part is borne by other elements in a construction. An example is the interaction between case inflection and prepositions in many Indo-European languages where we observe both bare case usage without a preposition and prepositional usage where a case is associated with a preposition . In the latter instance some linguists will ask whether the meaning is in the preposition or in the morpheme that marks the case and others will presume that if a trigger such as a preposition is present the inflectional morpheme is semantically empty. A cognitive linguist will however suggest a third solution that the meanings of the trigger element here the preposition and the inflectional morpheme are compatible motivating their coexistence
