2025 collection (80 titles)

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop

The study presented in this book explores the cultural models of GENDER and HOMOSEXUALITY in Indian and Nigerian English, drawing on the research fields of Cultural Linguistics, Cognitive Sociolinguistics and World Englishes. With the help of different methodologies and empirical data in the form of sociolinguistic interviews, multimodal film material and an online survey, the study scrutinises cultural conceptualisations such as culture-specific conceptual metaphors or schemas and shows how they combine to larger, interconnected cultural models, which provide speakers with a conceptual logic for understanding and interpreting gender and homosexuality. The book further provides visualizations of these cultural models in the form of complex network representations. This scholarly work caters to readers interested in the culturally oriented strands of Cognitive Linguistics, in sociolinguistics, in World Englishes research and in questions on language, gender and homosexuality. It offers valuable insights into the intricate connections between language, culture and cognition.

This volume brings together research on Italian and Italo-Romance varieties spoken as heritage languages across the world, with contributions from different fields of linguistics and from diverse regions (the Americas, Australia, Europe). It offers a timely update on the state of the art, combining studies on relatively well-documented communities with investigations of lesser-known groups and linguistic phenomena. A distinctive feature of the book is its search for a shared framework for studying Italo-Romance heritage language communities, namely one that takes into account the wide range of linguistic resources present in these settings. The chapters include in-depth studies of Italian and Italo-Romance heritage languages, as well as analyses of more complex repertoires, such as communities where both Italian and dialect are spoken, and onward migrant communities in Berlin and London.

Eyes on Text presents a contemporary overview of research on eye movements in reading and language processing by spinning around the heptagon of cognitive science, which consists of linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, artificial intelligence, education in its corners. The book consists of four parts: basics, methodology, perspectives, and bridging the gaps. After introducing the basic terminology in the first two chapters, the book introduces the methodology of the research on eyes on text, focusing on factors that shape experiment designs and data analysis. The book then introduces modeling perspectives (models of human text processing and eye movement control), empirical perspectives (eyes on text at various levels of language processing), and reader-oriented perspectives (children, elderly readers, reading disorders, and nonnative reading processes) to the study of eyes on text. The final chapters of the book discuss the diversity of the current approaches and introduce several frontiers that allow bridging the gaps between the domains that conduct studies on eyes on text. It emphasizes the incorporation of the Human-in-the-Loop (HitL) paradigm into Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications as a promising approach to bridge the gaps between the domains, also allowing designing personalized interfaces.

The study of Romance linguistics has long been a vibrant and dynamic field, enriched by diverse theoretical perspectives and a range of methodological innovations. This volume gathers contributions from leading scholars and emerging voices in the field to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of key issues in contemporary Romance linguistics. It offers a rich cross-section of the field’s current landscape, with a particular focus on Spanish and French, and explores how recent advancements in linguistic theory and methodology intersect with real-world language use in diverse social and cultural contexts.

At the heart of this volume is a tribute to the distinguished careers of Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, two scholars whose work has had a profound impact on the interdisciplinary study of Romance languages. Their groundbreaking research has not only shaped our understanding of key issues in syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics, but also set the stage for future innovations in the discipline. This collection brings together the legacy of their scholarship, honoring their contributions while simultaneously advancing the field they have so profoundly influenced.

This book comprehends a unique collection of articles on the rhetorical tools, with special reference to both discursive and verbo-visual metaphor. It focuses on monomodal and multimodal figurative representations in wine discourse, in political discourse, and in the sports media. Moreover, it encompasses a discussion of the questionable role played by metaphor in scientific discourse concerning climate issues. The art and cognition, and multimodality issues are empowered in this volume through the cognitive-oriented analysis of Andre Varda’s films, Banksy’s graffiti, and a comprehensive typological approach of the Tromp l’oeil technique.

Personalization has become a central feature of political communication. Politicians appear on late-night talk shows, smile from billboards, and post family photos on social media – placing themselves at the heart of public discourse. As individual personalities take center stage, abstract political ideologies and political collectives fade into the background. The Person in Politics explores the linguistic dimension of this shift through the cognitive semantic analysis of pronominal references. Drawing on a thorough account of how pronouns are used in American presidential nomination acceptance speeches and with what purpose, this work investigates how politicians emphasize individual leadership and craft collective identities with personal pronouns. Offering valuable insights into the intersection of language and political campaign rhetoric, this book is relevant for scholars of cognitive linguistics and political communication, as well as practicioners seeking to navigate the evolving field of political discourse.

This monograph introduces the Evaluative Discourse Metaphor model, which argues that participants in public and semi-public online discourse (re)use evaluative metaphors to construct and maintain communities. We explore how such metaphors trigger others with similar forms, though not necessarily the same evaluative targets, generating discourse spaces unified by a shared evaluative ethos. The model draws on a discourse-based view of metaphor, Hallidayan metafunctions, Du Bois’s stance triangle, and insights from computer-mediated communication, with a focus on affordances and community-building. We define or redefine key concepts including single evaluative metaphors, metaphorical complexes, triggers, bondicons, and chains. Rather than departing from existing literature, we integrate it into a framework valuable to scholars in metaphor studies, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and online communication.

This volume brings together empirical research in sociolinguistics that focuses on Arabic and Spanish contact across different geopolitical, sociocultural, and digital spaces. Bridging historical and modern sociolinguistic perspectives, this volume challenges the marginalization of Arabic-Spanish contact as well as Judeo-Spanish in linguistic research, shedding light on the enduring global relevance of the study of these languages and their contexts.

With contributions employing diverse methodologies – quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches – this collection examines topics such as multilingualism, identity, language variation, and language ideologies and attitudes. The volume also features research regarding the contemporary sociolinguistic dynamics of Arabic and Spanish in education, familial, and religious contexts. This volume is essential for scholars of sociolinguistics, historical and contemporary linguistics, language policy and planning, and language education. Finally, the volume offers novel insights that expand the field and inspire new directions in Spanish and Arabic linguistics.

Whilst the Dutch language cannot be considered a world language in the manner of English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French, the fact that speakers of Dutch have sailed to the four corners of the earth means that it cannot be overlooked in language-contact studies. This volume brings together scholars from across the globe to showcase the many varied outcomes of contact between Dutch and other languages in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. These outcomes include language learning, translation, multilingualism, codeswitching, lexical borrowing, grammatical interference, the emergence of contact varieties such as creoles, and language shift or ‘first-language attrition’. Other subjects that the volume covers include the circulation of Dutch loanwords, translanguaging, sprachbund studies, taboo words, animal names, call names, language beliefs, Dutch as a heritage language, and Dutch in online spaces. In short, the contributions in this volume tell the story of the many outcomes of contact between Dutch and other languages across the centuries and across the world.