This volume deals with core issues in figurative language and figurative thought. It also explores areas of convergence between idealised cognitive models and language across fourteen European and non-European languages (Croatian, English, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Old Saxon, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). The collection foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativeness in meaning construction, it emphasises the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and it also depicts the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives, such as language variation and cultural models, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse and the role of empirical work in cognitive linguistics.

A multidisciplinary collaboration exploring the role of cultural knowledge in everyday language and understanding.

The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse. In line with the well-known volume Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Holland and Quinn (1987), the volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics has further explored the idea that we think about social reality in terms of models - 'cognitive/cultural models' or 'folk theories'. As in cultural models, the present volume demonstrates that the technical apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume wants to pursue is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.

Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

This monograph studies cognitive operations on cognitive models across levels and domains of meaning construction. It explores in what way the same set of cognitive operations, either in isolation or in combination, account for meaning representation whether obtained on the basis of inferential activity or through constructional composition. As a consequence, it makes explicit links between constructional and figurative meaning. The pervasiveness of cognitive operations is explored across the levels of meaning construction (argument, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure) distinguished by the Lexical Constructional Model. This model is a usage-based approach to language that reconciles insights from functional and cognitive linguistics and offers a unified account of the principles and constraints that regulate both inferential activity and the constructional composition of meaning. This book is of value to scholars with an interest in linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction. The contents relate to the fields of Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Construction Grammar, Functional Linguistics, and Inferential Pragmatics.

This open access book introduces a general framework that allows natural language researchers to enhance existing competence theories with fully specified performance and processing components. Gradually developing increasingly complex and cognitively realistic competence-performance models, it provides running code for these models and shows how to fit them to real-time experimental data. This computational cognitive modeling approach opens up exciting new directions for research in formal semantics, and linguistics more generally, and offers new ways of (re)connecting semantics and the broader field of cognitive science. The approach of this book is novel in more ways than one. Assuming the mental architecture and procedural modalities of Anderson's ACT-R framework, it presents fine-grained computational models of human language processing tasks which make detailed quantitative predictions that can be checked against the results of self-paced reading and other psycho-linguistic experiments. All models are presented as computer programs that readers can run on their own computer and on inputs of their choice, thereby learning to design, program and run their own models. But even for readers who won't do all that, the book will show how such detailed, quantitatively predicting modeling of linguistic processes is possible. A methodological breakthrough and a must for anyone concerned about the future of linguistics! (Hans Kamp) This book constitutes a major step forward in linguistics and psycholinguistics. It constitutes a unique synthesis of several different research traditions: computational models of psycholinguistic processes, and formal models of semantics and discourse processing. The work also introduces a sophisticated python-based software environment for modeling linguistic processes. This book has the potential to revolutionize not only formal models of linguistics, but also models of language processing more generally. (Shravan Vasishth) .

Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research. The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Language in Use examines language processing and first language learning and illuminates the insights that discourse and usage-based models provide in issues of second language learning. Using a diverse array of methodologies, it examines how speakers employ various discourse-level resources to structure interaction and create meaning. Finally, it addresses issues of language use and creation of social identity. Unique in approach and wide-ranging in application, the contributions in this volume place emphasis on the analysis of actual discourse and the insights that analyses of such data bring to language learning as well as how language shapes and reflects social identity—making it an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in cutting-edge linguistics.