How cognitive linguistics tackles with the boundary between lexicon and grammar
What is it about?
A number of linguistic issues are traditionally dealt with either in terms of lexicon or in terms of grammar. Cognitive linguistics offers insights and tools to deal with this differently. After a closer examination it turns out that a number of problems that seem purely grammatical have in fact lexical basis and vice versa.
Why is it important?
Such an approach helps you realise that many boundaries that are encountered in linguistics are in fact artificial and arbitrary and once you see the lexical and grammatical side of the problem you not only come to understand the problem more clearly but also discover new dimensions of it. The range of issues that are dealt with in the book is really wide - it extends from seemingly well-comprehended and purely lexical issues, e.g. metaphor, to those that seem to be strictly grammatical, e.g. verb complementation, constructions, countability and uncountability, etc.