Annalisa Baicchi - Böcker

The book illustrates how the human ability to adapt to the environment and interact with it can explain our linguistic representation of the world as constrained by our bodies and sensory perception.

This book approaches the field of contrastive linguistics from a comparative and robust perspective that combines the tenets of construction grammar and cognitive linguistics.

The specialised language of fashion draws the research interest of linguists and semioticians as well as communication experts and fashion historians. This volume contributes to advancing the knowledge of crucial aspects in the language of fashion that still need deep investigation. It brings together contributions that shed light on the morphological, lexical, pragmatic, and cultural aspects of the language of fashion, without ignoring cognitive and semiotic phenomena. The diversity of topics and perspectives of the chapters presented here testifies to the variety and vitality of scientific research in the complex and multifaceted language of fashion.

This book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’ (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning.