2025 collection (published to date)

The volume is of direct interest to scholars, from senior academics to PhD students, interested in linguistically relevant phonetic and gestural information and in the relationship between multimodal communication and grammar. It contains important work in a relatively new, dynamic and exploratory field that is receiving a lot of attention, namely the relation of multimodal communication with grammatical frameworks, notably Construction Grammar. Drawing on case studies in different languages (English, Modern Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Italian), the chapters provide both the necessary theoretical discussion and solid empirical evidence (corpus-based or experimental) for integrating multimodal interactional features with grammatical description and analysis. This timely collection of studies highlights the recent marriage of cognitive/constructional and interactional approaches and addresses head-on questions and challenges like: which multimodal features are systematic and conventional enough to be integrated into grammar and what are appropriate ways of achieving the integration.

This book pioneers the study of Lánnang-uè, deeply embedded in Manila’s Lannang community’s culture. It approaches Lánnang-uè not just as a language but as a vibrant social practice, highlighting its variability and complex social meanings (e.g., identity-marking). Over six years and with more than 150 participants, the monograph integrates contemporary, community-focused, and critical sociolinguistic frameworks to explore and document linguistic variation as well as change signaling attrition, challenging reductive academic views. Employing diverse methodologies—surveys, elicitation, interviews, computational modeling, and ethnography— the work offers a nuanced depiction of Lánnang-uè’s diversity. A decolonial stance is advocated, emphasizing the complex practices that define the language and its speakers’ identity. It critiques the idea of a uniform linguistic standard, presenting Lánnang-uè as shaped by local, diverse, and inclusive practices, urging a reevaluation of language ownership and authenticity. This monograph is crucial for scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation, and contact linguistics, informing language revitalization efforts and enriching global discussions on linguistic diversity and discrimination.

The book presents an integrated model of vagueness as an implicit and persuasive strategy, pervasive in everyday language use and public discourse. It considers three macro-dimensions of the phenomenon: linguistic-theoretical, psychological, and social-discursive.

It shows how vagueness can be strategically employed to elude recipients’ critical evaluation of intended contents, to deresponsibilize the source and make their arguments unchallengeable.

It explores the semiotic, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic nature of vagueness, and looks at its use in contemporary public (with a focus on Italian) discourse.

It also delves into under-explored aspects of the phenomenon such as: the continuum of intentionality in the use of vague expressions; the evolutionary significance of vagueness; its implicitating and persuasive functions; the phenomenon of vagueness by implicature; the interaction between vague expressions and context precisation; the cognitive functioning of vague expressions; the use of vagueness in contemporary persuasive vs. non-persuasive text types; gender-based differences in the use of vagueness in public discourse.