1987-2017: Thirty years of Idealised Cognitive Models

This 2017 Language issue of Textus intends to celebrate the 30th anniversary since the publication of George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, a landmark book that is unanimously considered crucial to any linguist who is eager to understand how human beings gain knowledge of the world, categorise it, and talk about it. The basic tenet that categorisation is central “to thought, perception, action, and speech” (Lakoff 1987: 5) had already been partially advanced seven years before in Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s cutting-edge volume Metaphors We Live By, where the authors proposed the “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” that marked the breakthrough of Cognitive Linguistics and still plays a pivotal role to further research in a relatively disparate array of fields, such as discourse studies, lexicology, morphology, grammatical analysis, translation, and multimodality, to name just a few. The articles that comprise this issue of Textus take the veil from Lakoff’s innovative work on categories (1987) and bank on the bulk of literature that has been produced in the Functional-Cognitive Linguistics community over the last thirty years, with a view to exploring the inextricable interconnections between thought and language in figurativity in an array of topics that range from word-formation, verb semantics, lexicon and lexically-specified constructions to cognitive translation studies, forensic linguistics, ESP, and multimodality, also placing the emphasis on the potential developments in future research.