ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the most basic lines of research in the field of cognitive linguistics and discourse studies are outlined. In particular, the focus is on two shifts which discourse studies on cognitive phenomena have undergone during the past three decades: the first being a shift to contextual, sociolinguistic, cultural, and individual variation; and the second being a shift to real language use with growing interest in spoken and multimodal data. Based on examples of each domain, the chapter gives an overview of how studies have evolved around topics such as metaphor, metonymy, blending, construction, viewpoint, and discourse models in general.
