ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the characteristics of a cognitive approach to grammar. A cognitive approach adopts two fundamental assumptions: the symbolic thesis and the usage-based thesis. It also sketches the architecture of the cognitive model of grammar. It identifies four main types of theoretical approaches. First, The 'Conceptual Structuring System Model'; second, Cognitive Grammar; third, Constructional approaches to grammar; and fourth Cognitive theories of grammaticalisation. In traditional descriptive grammar, where the word classes were inherited from Latin grammar via the traditional grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English is usually described as having eight word classes: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Subject and object are types of grammatical function. This is a useful distinction, because phrases of different categories can perform the same grammatical function, and phrases of the same category can perform different grammatical functions.
