Alexandra Bagasheva - Böcker

The human ability to think non-literally has attracted the interest of various scholars for thousands of years. Over the centuries, they have defined and studied an extensive variety of tropes, such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, and irony, in terms of their communicative effectiveness and stylistic aesthetics and basically interpreted these simply as figurative linguistic expressions and mere flourishes adding flavour to underlying non-figurative content.Today, figurativity is understood as constitutive of various processes of human comprehension of the world, human communicative interactions, and everyday human functioning. This volume constitutes a representative selection of studies that provide novel answers to the open questions of how non-literal thought and non-literal expression in various media and discourses (co-)exist. The book focuses on figurative cognitive operations enabling non-literal thought, language and other semiotic expressions. The unique set of viewpoints and authors' contributions upholds the cognitive approach to figurativity; it positions figurativity in various discursive environments, compares and contrasts figurativity in various languages and cultures, and traces the multimodal interplay of figurativity.

This pioneering research brings a new insight into derivational processes in terms of theory, method and typology. Theoretically, it conceives of derivation as a three-dimensional system. Methodologically, it introduces a range of parameters for the evaluation of derivational networks, including the derivational role, combinability and blocking effects of semantic categories, the maximum derivational potential and its actualization in relation to simple underived words, and the maximum and average number of orders of derivation. Each language-specific chapter has a unified structure, which made it possible to identify – in the final, typologically oriented chapter – the systematicity and regularity in developing derivational networks in a sample of forty European languages and in a few language genera and families. This is supported by considerations about the role of word-classes, morphological types, and the differences and similarities between word-formation processes of the languages belonging to the same genus/family.

This pioneering research brings a new insight into derivational processes in terms of theory, method and typology. Theoretically, it conceives of derivation as a three-dimensional system. Methodologically, it introduces a range of parameters for the evaluation of derivational networks, including the derivational role, combinability and blocking effects of semantic categories, the maximum derivational potential and its actualization in relation to simple underived words, and the maximum and average number of orders of derivation. Each language-specific chapter has a unified structure, which made it possible to identify – in the final, typologically oriented chapter – the systematicity and regularity in developing derivational networks in a sample of forty European languages and in a few language genera and families. This is supported by considerations about the role of word-classes, morphological types, and the differences and similarities between word-formation processes of the languages belonging to the same genus/family.