Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume II: Descriptive Application

This book is what I can call the most important book I have ever read on linguistics for three good reason:

1. When I was studying linguistics all my background was on generative linguistics, and I was educated to disregard any approach to language that uses a conceptual bias or a "semantical explanation" of syntactic problems. This book gave me solid seasons to belief that semantics is the main aspect of human language and that you can be serious and elegant explaining syntax without falling into an extreme formal reductionism.

2. Every explanation here rests over an explicit cognitive ability. There are no movements, transformations, extreme principles (a la "Goverment and Binding" or Minimalist fashion). There is just what anyone can recognize as a cognitive way to picture reality. So, concepts like profile, domain, foreground, background, temporal sacaning, conceptual region, etc, sound, at first very cryptical. But after a few moments, you are boud to say: "Yes, that's It. It's so simple and clear that I feel ashamed I couldn't have seen it earlier!".

3. Finally, the consecuences of a theory of grammar in wich natural cognition is deeply involved makes us think again about the human nature. That is, we are not specialized beings divided into perfectly isolated complex mental modules, but we are holistic creatures experiencing and comparing in a very flexible, creative way. And under that way of thinking, Ronald Langacker has developed one of the more compelling and insightful grammatical theories on modern linguistics.

I recomend this book for those who are looking for an alternative way to mainstream linguistics. Today, almost 20 years after the first time this book and his brother were first published, Cognitive Linguistics is a serious enterprise that can not be fully ackowledged without this masterpiece.