Book review: Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse: From Poetics to Politics. Edited by Christopher Hart. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. IBSN: 9781474450003, 206 pp.

This edited collection provides new insights into the readerly processing of textual features by extending Cognitive Linguistic models of lexis and grammar to text and discourse analysis. Each chapter showcases how applying frameworks from the Cognitive Linguistic toolkit of textual analysis to real communicative activities can reveal something new about the literary, rhetorical, or ideological effects authentic language usage has on readers’ experiences and mental processing. Its replicable analyses, using a variety of frameworks and methods with texts from assorted discursive genres, exemplify the viability of the Cognitive Linguistic enterprise for examining effects of textual choice on reader experience of text and discourse. This book therefore benefits researchers seeking to explore how Cognitive Linguistic approaches to text and discourse might suit their research projects.