2022 collection (96 titles)

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to, German zu, Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions, the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings, the authors show how senso-motoric functioning, life experience, individual knowledge, imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

Hegemony, Discourse, and Political Strategy revisits a question that has long fascinated socialists, progressives, democrats, Greens, and Marxists – how do left-wing forces win at politics? Thirty-five years ago, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe tackled this puzzle in ground-breaking fashion, by drawing on a signature blend of linguistics, Marxist theory, and poststructuralism that came to be known as post-Marxist Discourse Theory (PDT). This book takes up the legacy of Laclau and Mouffe, and elaborates PDT into a full-fledged theory of political strategy for the first time. It argues that post-Marxism provides the foundations for a form of discourse analysis that can explain how political strategies play out as well as why they fail or succeed. Its empirical potential to illuminate the dynamics of hegemonic struggles is demonstrated through a case study focusing on the contestation and politicization of EU trade policy in the European Parliament.

Humour in the Beginning presents a multidisciplinary collection of fourteen in-depth case-studies on the role of humour – both benign and blasphemous, elitist and ordinary, orthodox and heterodox – in early, formative stages of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and (late-antique) Judaism. Its coherence is strengthened by four preceding theoretical essays, many cross-references and a conclusion. Thus, the volume allows for a methodologically sound comparison and explanation of historical views on humour in the world’s most important religions. At first sight, the foundational period of religions do not seem to offer much opportunities for humour. A closer look on primary sources, however, reveals the ways in which people formulated answers to existing ideas on humour and laughter, in moments of religious renewal. Main topics include the incongruous nature of the divine, the role of anthropomorphism, superior and didactic humour, moderate laughter, responses from dissenters and the gap between religious regulations and reality.

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields have morphed into. This volume honors Raymond W. Gibbs, who played no small role in this upheaval.

The themes and insights emerging from the chapters (i.e., among others, a need for account integration, a new appreciation of the dynamic nature of figurative [and all] meaning-making, a need for continued broadening of the communicative techniques in our studied topics, greater attention to emotion, a deepened appreciation of social motivations and psychological processes involved, etc.) may guide us in our continued grappling with meaning-making and meaning-sharing, via metaphor, through figurative language, and via other communicative phenomena associated with them.

The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal derivation, often at the expense of other word-formation processes. This volume seeks to address the role that paradigms may play in the description of compounding, conversion and participles. This volume should be of interest to anyone specialized in the field of English morphology and word formation.

Understanding vocabulary and its role in language learning is one of the central tasks of applied linguistic research. It is also an area that has seen, and continues to see, huge progress in terms of the complexity and diversity of work being done. While this makes for a rich and exciting research scene, it can also make the task of developing vocabulary research skills a daunting one as specialist subfields develop ever more sophisticated concepts and methods. This book aims to give readers an understanding of the area that is both detailed and rounded by introducing them to understanding and doing vocabulary research from four key perspectives: corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, language testing, and teaching and learning. Within each area, a state-of-the-art review describes fundamental concepts and commonly used methods, evaluates ongoing methodological debates, and points to areas for future development. It aims both to give readers a solid grounding in the specialized methods and debates associated with each area and to build connections across these specializations, considering points of contact and ways in which they can work together.

Whenever we think about the world – including its concrete and abstract entities – we typically see a series of so-called mental images in front of our eyes that aid us in everyday problem solving and navigating ourselves in the world. Visual metaphors, similarly to their linguistic counterparts, largely build on such images.

Nevertheless, the interplay of metaphorical/metonymical text and imagery is not necessarily (and not usually) straightforward and raises complex theoretical and methodological questions. The eleven chapters in this collection address a wide range of such challenges, such as what are visual metaphors in the first place; how can they be identified; what is their relationship to linguistic metaphors; what are their most common manifestations; what knowledge structures are required for their interpretation; and how do they interact with metonymies. The studies cut across linguistics, politics, philosophy, poetry, art and history – highlighting the ubiquitous role that visual metaphor plays in everyday life and conceptualizations.

Originally published as special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1 (2020).

This volume reveals new insights on the faculty of language. By proposing a new approach in the analysis and description of Italian Sign Language (LIS), that can be extended also to other sign languages, this book also enlightens some aspects of spoken languages, which were often overlooked in the past and only recently have been brought to the fore and described.

First, the study of face-to-face communication leads to a revision of the traditional dichotomy between linguistic and enacted, to develop a new approach to embodied language (Kendon, 2004).

Second, all structures of language take on a sociolinguistic and pragmatic meaning, as proposed by cognitive semantics, which considers it impossible to trace a separation between purely linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge.

Finally, if speech from the point of view of its materiality is variable, fragile, and non-segmentable (i.e. not systematically discrete), also signs are not always segmentable into discrete, invariable and meaningless units. This then calls into question some of the properties traditionally associated with human languages in general, notably that of ‘duality of patterning’.

These are only some of the main issues you will find in this volume that has no parallel both in sign and in spoken languages linguistic research.

English Sentence Constructions departs from a usage-based theoretical perspective in which all language units -- which we refer to as constructions -- have both a meaning and form, and context is all-important in determining the function and form of these constructions.

As a starting-level module, English Sentence Constructions guides students of English or Language at tertiary level through different levels of analysis at the sentence, clause, phrase, and word level.

The book starts with an explanation of different sentence types and structures (Chapters 1 and 2), zooms in on the verb phrase as the central component of any sentence (in Chapters 3 and 4), before zooming in even closer, discussing word classes (Chapter 5) and phrases (Chapter 6). The next two chapters explicate the intricacies of sentence constituents that function as clauses (Chapter 7) and aid students in integrating all chapters by discussing sentence analysis at all levels (Chapter 8). The last chapter (Chapter 9) shows how knowledge about sentence constructions can be applied to effective writing in English.

English Sentence Constructions can be used in teacher-led modules, but the many exercises in each chapter, the clearly worked out answer keys, and a comprehensive glossary of terminology also make it suitable for self-study. For each chapter, there is an online test in which students can check their understanding.