ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some areas and focuses of language study from a cognitive linguistic perspective and provide some background on these for the teacher. In Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, participants within a clause/action chain typically play one of the following roles: an agent; a patient; an instrument. The concepts and terms described in the chapter are necessarily selective, and are offered to the classroom teacher as an introduction to some ways of thinking about language, meaning and structure that are informed by cognitive linguistic principles. Cognitive linguistics treat metaphor as a way of seeing one domain of knowledge in terms of another, where an abstract domain is given structure and meaning, and is understood in terms of a concrete domain. Modality can be expressed through modal auxiliary verbs and using other linguistic forms such as modal adjectives, modal adverbs and modal tags.
