Introduction

Abstract

"On March 22 and 23, 2000, Leiden University hosted an international symposium under the title ‘Language, Culture, and Cognition’. The organizers (Vincent van Heuven, Jeroen van de Weijer, and José Birker) had decided that the presence in Leiden of a number of interesting linguists at the time provided an opportunity for a workshop that should not be passed up. They succeeded in persuading the participants to speak at the symposium, and Leiden University to sponsor it. At the end of the second day, the organizers and the participants agreed that despite the diversity of the topics addressed, there had definitely been more than one common underlying thread. One of these was the central position assigned to meaning and function in explaining linguistic phenomena, another the large role played by the analysis of actual utterances to lay an empirical foundation for the hypotheses being investigated, and a third one the ambition to account for characteristics of linguistic systems and for linguistic usage simultaneously, using the same conceptual tools. It was this sense of commonality that made us conclude that we should definitely pursue the somewhat vague plan for a volume that we already had before the symposium"