This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

Autorentext

Javier E. Díaz Vera, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.

Klappentext

Honorary editors: Ronald W. Langacker, Dirk Geeraerts COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH offers a forum for the presentation of research within the perspective of cognitive linguistics. This rubric subsumes a variety of concerns and broadly compatible theoretical approaches that have a common basic outlook: that language is an integral facet of cognition which reflects the interaction of social, cultural, psychological, communicative and functional considerations, and which can only be understood in the context of a realistic view of acquisition, cognitive development and mental processing. Cognitive linguistics thus eschews the imposition of artificial boundaries, both internal and external. Internally, it seeks a unified account of language structure that avoids such problematic dichotomies as lexicon versus grammar, morphology versus syntax, etc. Externally, it seeks to explicate language structure in terms of other facets of cognition on which it draws, as well as the communicative function it serves. Linguistic analysis can therefore profit from the insights of neighboring and overlapping disciplines such as sociology, cultural anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and cognitive science. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Odelia Ahdout.