This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.

A look at the various cognitive, social, and linguistic aspects of how social identities are constructed, forgrounded and redefined in interaction. Concepts and methodologies are taken from studies in language variation and change, multilingualism, conversation analysis, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, as well as translation studies and applied linguistics.

The chapters constituting this volume focus on legal language seen from cross-cultural perspectives, a topic which brings together two areas of research that have burgeoned in recent years, i.e. legal linguistics and intercultural studies, reflecting the rapidly changing, multifaceted world in which legal institutions and cultural/national identities interact. Within the broad thematic leitmotif of this volume, it has been possible to identify two major strands: legal discourse across languages on the one hand, and legal discourse across cultures on the other. Of course, labels of this kind are adopted partly as a matter of convenience, and it could be argued that any paper dealing with legal discourse across languages inevitably has to do with legal discourse across cultures. But a closer inspection of the papers comprising each of these two strands reveals that there is a coherent logic behind the choice of labels. All seven chapters in the first section are concerned with legal topics where more than one language is at stake, whereas all seven chapters in the second section are concerned with legal topics where cultural differences are brought to the fore.

Academic discourse has recently become a blooming field of research for linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis, as well as pragmatics. The methodology and conventions employed in academic discourse, however, vary across cultures to a certain degree, and often represent obstacles for publishing in international journals for authors whose native language is not English, as top journals tend to centre on the Anglo-Saxon academic writing norms. This is one of the major reasons why national academic discourses need to be linguistically profiled and studied and contrastively compared against these norms. This volume contributes to this very objective by shedding light on academic discourse as effectuated in various, mostly Balkan countries, and contrasts it against the corresponding western, English discourse. Furthermore, academic discourse is studied through a variety of genres it can assume, such as research articles, conference proceedings, and university lectures. Through exploring the cultural differences in academic discourse and the standards of international academic writing, this volume offers readers a chance to become better equipped in publishing abroad. Opening with a chapter focusing on the general structure of research articles and national writing habits as a potential hindrance to publishing abroad, the book goes on to study the rhetorical structure of the abstracts, introductions and conclusions of research articles in linguistics, economics and civil engineering. The second part of the book deals with hedging, contrastively studied in international and national journals, with the following chapters studying cohesion as accomplished in academic writing. Part three deals with the syntactic and semantic features of academic discourse. This book will be of particular interest to linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis in general and academic discourse, and will also appeal to scholars from other research backgrounds wishing to familiarise themselves with international and national academic conventions, and thus overcome the hurdles relating to academic writing conventions when publishing abroad.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview, as well as breaking new ground, in a versatile and fast growing field. It contains four sections: Contrastive, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing of Second/Foreign Language Pragmatics, and Pragmatics in Corporate Culture Communication, covering a wide range of topics, from speech acts and politeness issues to Lingua Franca and Corporate Crises Communication. The approach is theoretical, methodological as well as applied, with a focus on authentic, interactional data. All articles are written by renowned leading specialists, who provide in-depth, up-to-date overviews, and view new directions and visions for future research.

The goal of this volume is to examine academic discourse (AD) from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The adjective Cross-cultural in the volume title is not just limited to national contexts but also includes a cross-disciplinary perspective. Twelve scientific fields are under scrutiny in the articles. One of the unique aspects of the volume is the inclusion of a variety of foreign languages (English (as a lingua franca), Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, and Norwegian). Besides, in several articles dealing with oral AD, comparisons and parallels are also established with written AD. The research methodologies used in the studies are varied and they offer an overview of the diversity and richness of approaches to AD. All in all, it is hoped that the volume appeals not only to young researchers but also to confirmed scholars interested in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural aspects of AD. It will also be of interest to language teachers or teachers who are involved with e.g. international students and academic mobility.

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.