Preliminary Material -- The Miracle of Language -- Towards an Empirical Cognitive Linguistics -- From Linguists’ Grammar to Speakers’ Grammars: Acceptability Judgments and Where (Not) to Get Them -- From Linguists’ Grammars to Speakers’ Grammars: Deconstructing the Mean Lean Grammar Machine -- From Linguists’ Grammar to Speakers’ Grammars: Individual Differences in Native Language Attainment -- Words as Constructions -- How Children Build Sentences (and Learn Grammar in the Process) -- How Adults Build Sentences: A Recycling Approach to Linguistic Productivity -- Functional Constraints, Usage and Mental Grammar -- Constructing a Second Language -- References -- Important Resources for Cognitive Linguistics -- Appendix.

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This volume presents a synthesis of cognitive linguistic theory and research on first and second language acquistion, language processing, individual differences in linguistic knowledge, and on the role of multi-word chunks and low-level schemas in language production and comprehension. It highlights the tension between “linguists’ grammars”, which are strongly influenced by principles such as economy and elegance, and “speakers’ grammars”, which are often messy, less than fully general, and sometimes inconsistent, and argues that cognitive linguistics is an empirical science which combines study of real usage events and experiments which rigorously test specific hypotheses.