Meaning in Cognitive Linguistics

The paper gives an overview of the Cognitive Linguistic approach to meaning, given that meaning plays a central role in language. From the very beginnings, Cognitive Linguistics has focused its attention on how meaning is constructed in language, primarily by means of conceptualization, resulting in linguistic structures which 'have' meaning. A short survey is given of image schemas, processes of meaning construal, symbolization, and usage based models. These and other concepts described in the paper are built into the theoretical foundations of cognitive linguistics and serve as a starting point for cognitive semantic analyses, whose number has also been on the increas in Croatia. Particular attention is paid to issues raised by the cognitive linguistic approach to lexical meaning and the recent quantitative approaches in cognitive lexical semantics.