In a collection of 16 papers, eminent scholars from several disciplines present diverse and yet cohering perspectives on the expression of social knowledge, its acquisition and management. Hence, the volume is an attempt to view the social functions of language in a novel, systematic way. Such an approach has been missing due to the complexity of the matter and the emphasis on purely cognitive properties of language. The volume starts with a presentation of overarching issues of the social nature of humans and their language, providing strong evidence for the social fundaments of human nature and their reflection in language and culture. The second section demonstrates how social functions can be displayed in discourse by using language play and humor, irony and attributions as well as references to social schemas. The chapters in the third part examine a wide range of particular linguistic elements carrying social-cognitive functions. An important finding is that social-cognitive functions have to be inferred on the basis of social knowledge, frequently with the help of non-verbal cues, since languages offer only few direct expressions for them. In other words, linguistic devices used to express social content tend to be multifunctional. Interestingly, this multifunctionality does not prevent their rapid recognition. The volume presents valuable information to linguists by widening the cognitive-linguistic framework and by contributing to a better understanding of the role of pragmatics. It is also beneficial to social and cognitive psychologists by offering a broader view on the encoding and decoding of social aspects. Finally, it offers a number of fruitful ideas to students of cultural and communication studies.

This volume serves to illustrate the promising insights to be gained when cross-fertilizing Cognitive Linguistics and contact linguistics, which each hold crucial ingredients to an encompassing study of contact-induced variation and change. Combining the study of the individual mind with the study of shared context, bridging research on experience and perspective with research on variation and change, and tackling the methodological complexities that this empirical approach to mental categorization entails, help us determine how the meaningful units that make up language are categorized and structured in the bi- and multilingual mind and, by extension, in any human mind. Together, the ten papers in this volume reveal the complexities of the interaction between usage, meaning and mind in contact-induced variation and change, which we hope will inspire future research exploring the possibilities of the cross-fertilization we have labeled Cognitive Contact Linguistics.

For students of developmental psychology, this book should be a useful reference guide to the main concepts concerned with "motherese", scaffolding, socio-cognitive learning and joint problem solving. It is also a contribution to the debate on the influence of social behaviour on development.

The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.

This monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way, the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other, which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners. To illustrate the theory, the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves. This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover, it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour, business communication, and computer-mediated communication.

The present book is a collection of selected papers held at the 11th Susanne Hübner Seminar from the 26th of February to the 1st of March 2001 in Zaragoza, Spain. The papers included in this volume address several issues connected with the relationship between what seems to be 'external' and 'internal' in human language usage. By 'external' is meant here communication, and more concretely, interaction; by 'internal', processing and conceptualization, that is to say, cognition. These two sides coincide with the subject-matter of two of the most active paradigms of linguistic research nowadays: pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, and the two main sections of this volume reflect two possible entry points to this dichotomy. The first section, Interacting, clearly puts the emphasis on interaction itself, whereas the second section, The system behind, is concerned with metaphor, metonymy and categorization processes.