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This book proposes a multidisciplinary assessment of the impact of complex diversity on language politics and policies analysing how the legacies of the old interact with the challenges of the new. Its main focus is on the interplay of multilingualism on the one hand and the dynamics of transnationalism globalisation and Europeanisation on the other. This interplay confronts contemporary societies with unprecedented questions as they face the need to come to grips with increasingly varied and pervasive manifestations of linguistic and cultural diversity. This volume develops an integrative approach that identifies the key social and political dimensions at hand offering an innovative contribution to the ongoing conversation on the manifestations and management of multilingualism.

The papers in this collection document the work of the first research project on metaphor that incorporates the findings of Frame Semantics Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Construction Grammar with Corpus Linguistics techniques for the analysis of linguistic expressions of metaphor in very large natural language corpora. Under severe constraints the MetaNet project based at the International Computer Science Institute designed and populated a sophisticated and accessible repository of conceptual metaphors developed a formalization for Conceptual Metaphor Theory and created tools and techniques for the automatic identification and analysis of the linguistic expression of metaphor. For those interested in metaphor be that from a linguistic literary poetic cognitive or computational perspective this book is a must-read. Originally published in Constructions and Frames 8:2 (2016).

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena from the history of core arguments to complements and non-finite clauses elements in the clause periphery as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another however they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so they show that historical syntax and historical linguistics in general is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.

This volume is the first book-length attempt to bring together the fields of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and second language pragmatics by exploring how the teaching and assessment of pragmatics can be integrated into TBLT. The TBLT-pragmatics connection is illustrated in a variety of constructs (e.g. speech acts honorifics genres interactional features) methods (e.g. quantitative quasi-experimental conversation analysis) and topics (e.g. instructed SLA heritage language learning technology-enhanced teaching assessment and discursive pragmatics). Chapters in this volume collectively demonstrate how the two fields can together advance the current practice of teaching language for socially-situated real-world communicative needs.

This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.

This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English Czech Spanish Slovene Russian and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar facework and rapport management classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing conceptual metaphor and blending mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches news reporting and advertising the book also studies texts that examine book reviews medieval medical recipes public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts pragmaticians and cognitive linguists this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists semioticians historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines.

In recent years Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has established itself not only as a solid theoretical approach but also as an important source from which different applications to other fields have emerged. In this volume we identify some of the current most relevant topics in applied CL-oriented studies – analyses of figurative language (both metaphor and metonymy) in use constructions and typology – and present high-quality research papers that illustrate best practices in the research foci identified and their application to different fields including intercultural communication the psychology of emotions second and first language acquisition discourse analysis and translation studies. It is also shown how different methodologies –the use of linguistic corpora psycholinguistic experiments or discourse analytic procedures– can shed some light on the basic premises of CL as well as providing insights into how CL can be applied in real world contexts. Finally all the studies included in the volume are based on empirical data and there are some analyses of languages other than English (Japanese Russian Spanish Danish German and Polish) thus overcoming the contentions that CL-theoretically-based research is often based on linguistic intuition and focused only on the English language.

We hope that the present volume will not only contribute to a better understanding of how CL can be applied but that it will also help to encourage even further more robust empirical research in this field.

Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 14:1 (2016).

The articles compiled in this volume offer new insights into the wealth of prosodic and syntactic phenomena involved in the encoding of information structure categories. They present data from languages which are rarely if ever taken into account in the most prominent approaches in information structure theory and which belong to the Afroasiatic Amerindian Australian Caucasian and Niger-Congo language stocks. In addition to the significant descriptive value of these pioneering contributions several studies also draw attention to previously undescribed or typologically rare phenomena. By adapting a variety of methods to under-described and endangered languages ranging from experimental to naturalistic corpus studies this volume also aims to serve as an invitation for further research in this direction.

This book contains new articles by leading philosophers and linguists discussing a promising philosophical framework distinct from currently dominant ones: Linguistic Realism. As opposed to Nominalism and Chomskyian Conceptualism this approach distinguishes between use of language knowledge of language and language as such. The latter is conceived as part of the realm of abstract objects. The authors show how adopting Linguistic Realism overcomes entrenched problems with other frameworks and suggest that Linguistic Realism will best serve those interested in formal linguistics the cognitive dimension of natural language and linguistic philosophy. The essays offer different perspectives on Linguistic Realism either supporting this paradigm or taking it as a starting point for developing modified conceptions of linguistics and for further tying linguistics to the kind of formal theories of sensory cognition that were pioneered in visual perception by David Marr—whose work is predicated on exactly the object/knowledge distinction made by Linguistic Realists.

This volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human identity each of which can be thought of as an aggregative abstraction with its own complexities: personal identity group identity and collective identity. The contributions pay special attention to the interplay between the public and private dimensions of the interactions and audiences as well as the potential impact of social and technical affordances of different communicative settings and online and offline modes of identity construction. The volume is aimed at all researchers concerned with the complex notion of identity both in linguistics and in neighbouring disciplines.