Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] – serie

This book describes and explores the linguistic metaphors used by architects to assess design solutions in building reviews, and the conceptual mappings that motivate them. The genre perspective adopted throughout the work offers a view of figurative language that considers its use in the discussion of architectural topics in a real communicative situation involving specific participants, clear rhetorical goals and recognisable textual artefacts. The book thus combines a genre approach to texts with a cognitive view of metaphor. It further aims to restore as the centre of attention the linguistic and textual aspects of metaphor as an instrument of both cognition and communication. The theoretical implications of the applied cognitive approach to metaphor adopted in the book are twofold. First, a situated description of how metaphor is used in a particular genre provides rich detail about its rhetorical potential. The second important contribution made by this study is to provide a fuller account of image metaphor, a type of mapping which is very salient in this particular genre. The weight given to visual metaphors in architectural discourse allows a fuller consideration of the cognitive and communicative import of a class of metaphor often regarded as marginal or ad hoc in cognitive linguistics, and the book thus contributes to a better understanding of this phenomenon in the context of a genre characterised by its concern with the visual aspects of architectural design. In this sense, the empirical data offered by a particular research methodology contributes to theory formation, and will prove of interest to cognitive linguists as well as to discourse analysts or genre researchers.

This first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process combines cognitive linguistics with genetic and literary criticism. It portrays two minds: the poet creating her poetics and poetry as well as the reader creating her interpretations of this poetry. It focuses on eight poems and their drafts, examining Elizabeth Bishop's poetic conceptualizations. It demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version.Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the most eminent American poets. Her work has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, Ph.D. in Linguistics, was a Fulbright scholar at the Vassar College Special Collections, which holds the Elizabeth Bishop archives. She translates contemporary Polish poetry and poetry written in English. She lives in Copenhagen.

This volume presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Spanish evidential semi-auxiliaries parecer and resultar, the modal constructions with amenazar and prometer, and the modal auxiliaries poder, deber and tener que. These verbs have never been considered together in a global approach that transcends the classical "verbal periphrases" model. The book proposes a cognitive-functional account of evidentiality and modality in Spanish with special attention to subjectivity and grounding. The theoretical reflection relies on empirical evidence of two sorts: synchronic and diachronic corpus-analyses alternate with tests that measure the semantic and pragmatic compatibility of the evidential and epistemic constructions with specific sentences. Following the assumption that linguistic forms are determined by their meaning, the array of constructions that characterizes the different verbs justifies their grouping in three pairs of (semi-)auxiliaries: parecer vs resultar, amenazar vs prometer and poder vs deber/tener que. The distributional differences observed in the corpus are further shown to correlate with different degrees of grammaticalization. Primarily intended for scholars working in the field of Spanish functional linguistics, the monograph is also relevant for grammaticalization studies and for cognitive-semantic research at large. Given its combined theoretical and applied character, the volume is also of interest to anyone concerned with syntactic processes, lexical semantics or the wider area of discourse analysis and pragmatics.

The studies in this volume show how speech practices can be understood from a culture-internal perspective, in terms of values, norms and beliefs of the speech communities concerned. Focusing on examples from many different cultural locations, the contributing authors ask not only: 'What is distinctive about these particular ways of speaking?', but also: 'Why - from their own point of view - do the people concerned speak in these particular ways? What sense does it make to them?'.The ethnopragmatic approach stands in opposition to the culture-external universalist pragmatics represented by neo-Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory. Using "cultural scripts" and semantic explications - techniques developed over 20 years work in cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues - the authors examine a wide range of phenomena, including: speech acts, terms of address, phraseological patterns, jocular irony, facial expressions, interactional routines, discourse particles, expressive derivation, and emotionality. The authors and languages are: Anna Wierzbicka (English), Cliff Goddard (Australian English), Jock Wong (Singapore English), Zhengdao Ye (Chinese), Catherine Travis (Colombian Spanish), Rie Hasada (Japanese) and Felix Ameka (Ewe). Taken together, these studies demonstrate both the profound "cultural shaping" of speech practices, and the power and subtlety of new methods and techniques of a semantically grounded ethnopragmatics. The book will appeal not only to linguists and anthropologists, but to all scholars and students with an interest in language, communication and culture.

Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives is an up-to-date survey of recent research in Cognitive Linguistics and its applications by prominent researchers. The volume brings together generally accessible syntheses and special studies of Cognitive Linguistics strands in a sizable format and is thus an asset not only to the Cognitive Linguistics community, but also to neighbouring disciplines and linguists in general. The volume covers a wide range of fields and combines wide accessibility with a highly specific information value.Key features: An excellent source for the study of Applied Cognitive Linguistics, one of the most popular and fastest growing areas in Linguistics. Authoritative and detailed survey articles by leading scholars in the field. Accessible to a general audience, yet also characterized by a highly specific information value.

In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with the main issues of a pedagogical grammar. A pedagogical grammar aims at providing all the essential linguistic patterns considered relevant by theoretical and descriptive linguistics for the preparation of teaching materials and their exploitation in foreign language instruction. The volume contains thirteen contributions organized into three parts. In Part 1 Langacker, Taylor and Broccias introduce the basic grammar concepts, rules and models that are available in cognitive linguistics and which are directly relevant to the construction of a pedagogical grammar. Meunier, on the other hand, describes how such a grammar could benefit from corpus linguistics. Part 2 looks at some cognitive tools and conceptual errors with contributions by Danesi and Maldonado and also reconsiders contrastive analysis in the papers by Ruiz de Mendoza and Valenzuela & Rojo. Part 3, finally, discusses language-specific constraints on a number of linguistic phenomena such as the construal of motion events (papers by Cadierno and De Knop & Dirven), distinctions in the tense-aspect system (papers by Niemeier & Reif and Schmiedtová & Flecken), and voice (Chen & Oller).

One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some higher potential called the "mind" and, more particularly, the intertwining of body and mind, which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in length. However, the interaction between culture, body and language has not received the due attention that it deserves. Naturally, any serious exploration of the interface between body, language and culture would require an analytical tool that would capture the ways in which different cultural groups conceptualize their feelings, thinking, and other experiences in relation to body and language. A well-established notion that appears to be promising in this direction is that of cultural models, constituting the building blocks of a group's cultural cognition. The volume results from an attempt to bring together a group of scholars from various language backgrounds to make a collective attempt to explore the relationship between body, language and culture by focusing on conceptualizations of the heart and other internal body organs across a number of languages. The general aim of this venture is to explore (a) the ways in which internal body organs have been employed in different languages to conceptualize human experiences such as emotions and/or workings of the mind, and (b) the cultural models that appear to account for the observed similarities as well as differences of the various conceptualizations of internal body organs. The volume as a whole engages not only with linguistic analyses of terms that refer to internal body organs across different languages but also with the origin of the cultural models that are associated with internal body organs in different cultural systems, such as ethnomedical and religious traditions. Some contributions also discuss their findings in relations to some philosophical doctrines that have addressed the relationship between mind, body, and language, such as that of Descartes.

Mastering the vocabulary of a foreign language is one of the most daunting tasks that language learners face. The immensity of the task is underscored by the realisation that it is not only single words but also numerous standardised phrases (idioms, collocations, etc.) that need to be acquired. There is thus a clear need for instructional methods that help learners tackle this task, and yet few proposals for vocabulary instruction have so far gone beyond techniques for rote-learning and familiar means of promoting of noticing. The reason for this is that vocabulary and phraseology have long been assumed arbitrary.The volume offers a long-overdue alternative by exploring and exploiting the presence of linguistic 'motivation' - or, systematic non-arbitrariness - in the lexicon. The first half of the volume reports ample empirical evidence of the pedagogical effectiveness of presenting vocabulary to learners as non-arbitrary. The data reported indicate that the proposed instructional methods can benefit when both the nature of the target lexis and the basic cognitive orientations of particular learners are taken into account. The first half of the book mostly targets lexis that has already attracted a fair amount of attention from Cognitive Linguists in the past (e.g. phrasal verbs and figurative idioms). The second half broadens the scope considerably by revealing the non-arbitrariness of diverse other lexical patterns, including collocations and word partnerships generally. This is achieved by recognising some long-neglected dimensions of linguistic motivation - etymological and phonological motivation, in particular. Concrete suggestions are made for putting the non-arbitrary nature of words and phrases to good use in instructed language learning. The volume is therefore of interest not only to applied linguists and researchers in Second Language Acquisition/Foreign Language Teaching, but also to second and foreign language teaching professionals.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes.The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

"Metaphor studies" has over the past 30 years become a discipline in its own right, mainly because of the cognitive linguistic claim that metaphors characterize thought, not just language. But most metaphor scholars hitherto focus exclusively on its purely verbal expressions. Since both persuasive and narrative discourses in contemporary society increasingly draw on modalities other than language alone, sustained research into a broader range of manifestations of metaphor is imperative.This volume is the first book-length study to investigate multimodal occurrences of metaphor, and is of interest to scholars interested in metaphor as well as in multimodal discourse. Each chapter investigates metaphors whose identification and interpretation depend on the co-presence of at least two of the following modalities: language, visuals, gestures, sound, music. On the basis of case studies in a variety of discourse genres (advertising, cartoons, films, comics, conversation, music, amply represented in photographs, logos, drawings, film stills, and musical scores), the contributors demonstrate that, and how, metaphor can occur multimodally, providing ideas and methodological angles enabling further theorizing and testing in this rapidly expanding field. Covering creative as well as conceptual metaphors, and where appropriate evaluating cultural factors governing metaphor interpretation, the contributors provide a wealth of material for studying the conceptual and rhetorical force of metaphor in contemporary society.

This book is a cognitive semantic study of the Chinese conceptualization of the heart, traditionally seen as the central faculty of cognition. The Chinese word xin, which primarily denotes the heart organ, covers the meanings of both "heart" and "mind" as understood in English, which upholds a heart-head dichotomy. In contrast to the Western dualist view, Chinese takes on a more holistic view that sees the heart as the center of both emotions and thought. The contrast characterizes two cultural traditions that have developed different conceptualizations of person, self, and agent of cognition.The concept of "heart" lies at the core of Chinese thought and medicine, and its importance to Chinese culture is extensively manifested in the Chinese language. Diachronically, this book traces the roots of its conception in ancient Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. Along the synchronic dimension, it not only makes a systematic analysis of conventionalized expressions that reflect the underlying cultural models and conceptualizations, as well as underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies, but also attempts a textual analysis of an essay and a number of poems for their metaphoric and metonymic images and imports contributing to the cultural models and conceptualizations. It also takes up a comparative perspective that sheds light on similarities and differences between Western and Chinese cultures in the understanding of the heart, brain, body, mind, self, and person. The book contributes to the understanding of the embodied nature of human cognition situated in its cultural context, and the relationship between language, culture, and cognition.

The volume presents an up-to-date collection of methodologically sensitive contributions providing mainly enthusiastic, at times also critical support for the cognitive-linguistic enterprise. The book is important for the advancement of cognitive linguistics because the contributions demonstrate the seriousness of its ambitions to develop into a set of testable linguistic approaches. For the same reason, the volume is a contribution to our understanding of language in general, since it puts a promising modern approach on firmer ground. Assets of the book include the wide range of linguistic phenomena studied (individual concepts, fundamental semantic problems like vagueness and polysemy, grammatical issues incl. gender and tense, collocations, constructions and speech acts) and the scope of applied perspectives including lexicographical, computational, developmental and critical discourse ones. The languages investigated are English, German, Dutch, Polish and Italian.Common to the contributions is the desire to bring together observed patterns of linguistic usage with concepts and models established in cognitive linguistics. In addition, all contributions have an empirical basis and emphasize the need to rely on a sound methodology. The linguistic phenomena investigated span the range from the lexico-conceptual and collocational level to constructions, grammatical categories and functions.Two complementary perspectives of language and cognition are represented in the volume: In one group, the established methods of psycholinguistic experimentation, quantitative corpus analysis and computational simulation are exploited to demonstrate the viability and to increase the plausibility of cognitive-linguistic thinking. The second group tests well-known cognitive-linguistic approaches like Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the Theory of Idealized Cognitive Models and Construction Grammar against authentic data demonstrating their applicability and explanatory potential. Both groups include contributions reaching beyond the scope of traditional cognitive-linguistic topics, e.g. by taking a critical stance of reductionist cognitive thinking.The volume is of interest to cognitive linguists, psycholinguists, theoretical linguists, lexicologists, and lexicographers.

For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative perspective, distancing discourse, etc.) may be fruitfully approached by applying cognitive linguistic concepts and insights (such as embodied cognition, metaphor, mental spaces, iconicity, construction grammar, figure/ground alignment, etc.), in an attempt to support, enrich or adjust ‘traditional’ poetic analysis. Conversely, the tradition of poetics may support, frame or call into question insights form cognitive linguistics.In order to capture the goals, gains and gaps of this rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research, this volume brings together some of the key players and critics of cognitive poetics. The eleven chapters are grouped into four major sections, each dealing with central concerns of the field: (i) the cognitive mechanisms, discursive means and mental products related to narrativity (Semino, Herman, Culpeper); (ii) the different incarnations of the concept of figure in cognitive poetics (Freeman, Steen, Tsur); (iii) the procedures that are meant to express or create discursive attitudes, like humour, irony or distance in general (Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, Giora et al.); and (iv) a critical assessment of the current state of affairs in cognitive poetics, and more specifically the incorporation of insights from cognitive linguistics as only one of the contributing fields in the interdisciplinary conglomerate of cognitive science (Louwerse and Van Peer, Sternberg). The ensuing dialogue between cognitive and literary partners, as well as between advocates and opponents, is promoted through the use of short response articles included after ten chapters of the volume. Geert Brône, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Jeroen Vandaele, University of Oslo, Norway.

In view of the considerable number of recent publications devoted to various applications of Cognitive Linguistics, the book focusses on fields that have not been extensively dealt with within the CL framework. The book gathers presentations that deal with fields of application as defined in the introduction to the first volume in the ACL series (Kristiansen et al 2006). The articles in the first section ("From loop to cycle") are defining papers written by eminent scholars whose position within the field of CL has been firmly established. They touch upon issues of continuing relevance to the discipline and introduce thematic areas covered in the next four sections of the volume. Papers in these sections are mainly written by young scholars, whose research illustrates various ways to implement the cycle through different forms of contextualization, either presenting descriptive applications that lead to theoretical amendments or widening the field of possible applications, often interdisciplinary, e.g. to theological or metaphysical discourse. Frequently, section papers provide illustration for the empirical turn in Cognitive Linguistics, demonstrating the ways in which application of theory to new data using new methodologies leads to refinement, development or modification of the theoretical framework.The book is of relevance to students of (applied) linguistics, interested or specializing in language acquisition and pedagogy, intercultural communication, literary and translation studies, as well as to academics and students representing cognate disciplines.

Nominated for the Best contribution to Slavic Linguistics/AATSEEL book award 2011The concept of complex emotions is obviously polysemous. On the one hand, we can interpret it as a non-basic, non-prototypical, or culture-specific notion, on the other - and this is the interpretation we propose in this work - a complex emotion concept can be looked upon as a concept whose complexity emerges in interaction, due to the complex nature of its object. Our interpretation is thus construction-based, one in which meaning is not to be found exclusively in the lexical semantics of the term, but also in the, clearly meaning-laden, grammatical construction, e.g. a complement clause, expressing the object or cause of the emotion. The construal of a scene mapped on the form of a complex sentence involves the emotion that is unambiguously complex and not necessarily universal or prototypical. We argue throughout this book that cross-linguistic grammatical mismatches are a visible sign of conceptual and categorizational distinctions between the conceptualization of emotion in different languages and cultures. They also signal differences in what individual speakers consider salient in a portrayed scene.We offer a contrastive corpus-based study of Polish and English emotion concepts and the linguistic patterns they enter. Our theoretical approach combines lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics and proposes a cognitive corpus linguistics methodology. It is a cognitive linguistic endeavor in which we analyze grammatical category mismatches and provide detailed semantic analyses of different complement choices of emotion predicates. We also discuss insights into Polish and English cultural values gleaned from the different underlying categorizations of emotions. Combining theoretical analyses with pedagogical theory and classroom applications, this work breaks new ground and will reach audiences of linguists, teachers and students of Polish, teachers and students of English, translators, and other language researchers and practitioners.

In contexts of instructed second language acquisition there is a need for teaching methods that are optimally efficient, i.e. teaching interventions that generate a maximal return on learners' and teachers' investment of time and effort. In the past couple of decades, many researchers have argued that insights from Cognitive Linguistics (CL) - when suitably translated for pedagogical purposes - can make a major contribution to fostering such language teaching efficiency. This collective volume assesses and supplements those CL proposals.The first part of the book positions CL-inspired language pedagogy vis-à-vis recent trends in mainstream applied linguistics and illustrates through several case studies that language-focused instruction (including CL-inspired instruction) is a useful - if not indispensable - complement to learner-autonomous, incidental acquisition. The second part demonstrates how CL research can help pedagogues identify hitherto neglected language elements that merit explicit targeting in second language instruction. The third part consists of contributions that put the pedagogical efficiency of several CL-inspired interventions to the test in classroom experiments. Additions to the currently available armoury of teaching methods are proposed. The kinds of target language items under examination in the book range from single words over multiword units to grammar patterns. Throughout, the volume illustrates how much pedagogy-oriented Cognitive Linguistics has matured in recent years.

Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.

While the role of metaphor in economics and business has produced multiple research articles, no comprehensive book-length study has yet appeared. The present book is a timely attempt to fill this gap, giving a global coverage of the role of metaphor in business and economics. It spans time (from Classical Greece to the current business network meeting-room), space (from Europe through the Americas to Asia), cultures and languages (from continental European languages, Brazilian Portuguese to Chinese). The theoretical grounding of the book is the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor taken in a dynamic sense as evolving with on-going research. The theory is thus used, adapted and refined in accordance with the evidence provided. Metaphor is shown to be theory constitutive in the elaboration of economic thinking down through the ages while, at the same time, the emphasis on evidence open to historical, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic considerations align with the current notion of situatedness. The book is a rich source of information for researchers and students in the fields of Metaphor Studies, Economics, Discourse Analysis, and Communication Studies, among others.

This book explores the importance of Cognitive Linguistics for specialized language within the context of Frame-based Terminology (FBT). FBT uses aspects of Frame Semantics, coupled with premises from Cognitive Linguistics to structure specialized domains and create non-language-specific knowledge representations. Corpus analysis provides information regarding the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of specialized knowledge units. Also studied is the role of metaphor and metonymy in specialized texts. The first section explains the purpose and structure of the book. The second section gives an overview of basic concepts, theories, and applications in Terminology and Cognitive Linguistics. The third section explains the Frame-based Terminology approach. The fourth section explores the role of contextual information in specialized knowledge representation as reflected in linguistic contexts and graphical information. The final section highlights the conclusions that can be derived from this study.

Creativity is a highly-prized quality in any modern endeavor, whether artistic, scientific or professional. Though a much-studied subject, and the topic of a great many case-studies, the field of creativity research is still very much an open one. Creativity remains a field where absolute definitions hold very little water, and where true insight can only emerge when we properly appreciate - from a nuanced, multi-disciplinary perspective - the crucial distinction between the producer's perspective and the consumer's perspective. Theories that afford us a critical appreciation of a creative work do not similarly afford a explanatory insight into the origins and development of the work. As researchers, we must approach creativity both as producers - to consider the vast search-spaces that a producer encounters, and to appreciate the need for heuristic strategies for negotiating this space - and as consumers, to appreciate the levels of shared knowledge (foreground and background) that is exploited by the producer to achieve a knowingly creative effect in the mind of the consumer. This volume thus brings together both producers and consumers in a cross-disciplinary exploration of this complex, many-faceted phenomenon.

This book provides an interdisciplinary, unified view of sensual cognition and its cultural manifestations. The contributors favour an ecological perspective and revisit and problematize some of the core assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics. One of the original tenets of CL states that human thinking is grounded in experiential gestalts as well as in interaction between peoples' embodied minds and their various environments or cultures. In addition to looking in detail at this tenet, the volume provides major insights into the methodological and theoretical dimensions of Cognitive Linguistics research and describes applications of the paradigm in diverse contexts and cultures.

No detailed description available for "Cognitive Linguistics and Translation".

The "one-nation-one-language" assumption is as unrealistic as the well-known Chomskyan ideal of a homogeneous speech community. Linguistic pluricentricity is a common and widespread phenomenon; it can be understood as either differing national standards or differing local norms. The nine studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. They include research undertaken in both the Cognitive Linguistic and socolinguistic tradition, with particular emphasis upon the emerging framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Six languages, all more or less pluricentric, are analyzed: four Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) and two Romance languages (Portuguese and French). The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and perception and attitudes in relation to these pluricentric languages. It makes use of advanced empirical methods able to account for the complex interplay between conceptual and social aspects of pluricentric variation and other forms of language-internal variation.

The claim that crosslinguistic disparities foster differences in nonlinguistic thought, often referred to as 'linguistic relativity', has for some time been the subject of intense debate. For much of that time the debate was not informed by much experimental work. Recently, however, there has been an explosion of research on linguistic relativity, carried out by numerous scholars interested in the interaction between language and nonlinguistic cognition. This book surveys the rapidly accruing research on this topic, much of it carried out in the last decade. Structured so as to be accessible to students and scholars in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, it first introduces crucial concepts in the study of language and cognition. It then explores the relevant experimentally oriented research, focusing independently on the evidence for relativistic effects in spatial orientation, temporal perception, number recognition, color discrimination, object/substance categorization, gender construal, as well as other facets of cognition. This is the only book to extensively survey the recent work on linguistic relativity, and should serve as a critical resource for those concerned with the topic.

To what extent can Cognitive Linguistics benefit from the systematic study of a creative phenomenon like humor? Although the authors in this volume approach this question from different perspectives, they share the profound belief that humorous data may provide a unique insight into the complex interplay of quantitative and qualitative aspects of meaning construction.

This book presents novel data from endangered languages and cultures that are ever so often still not focused on. It combines different disciplines to capture the intricacies of spatial orientation and navigation. Also, the interplay between culture through language and practices presents new insights in the importance of combining cognitive semantics with cognitive anthropology.

Expressing location is one of the most common linguistic tasks that we perform in our daily lives. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis into how speakers of English and French use gesture as well as speech when describing where objects are located. It shows that spoken locative expressions are made up of both speech and gesture components, and that the two modalities contribute in a complementary fashion to convey locative meaning.

This edited volume brings together perspectives that find mutual kinship in a view of language as an embodied, semiotic, symbolic tool used for communicative and interactional purposes and an understanding of language use as the preeminent condition for language learning – perspectives that we conjoin under the umbrella term of usage based perspectives.

Based on a state-of-the-art review of prior research in all related domains, this book makes precise predictions about the expected effects of specific type and token frequency distributions in input floods and tests these in the second language classroom context.