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Cognitive Sociolinguistics draws on the rich theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and focuses on the social factors that underlie the variability of meaning and conceptualization. In the last decade, the field has expanded in various way. The current volume takes stock of current and emerging advances in the field in short academic contributions. The studies collected in this book have a usage-based approach to language variation and change, drawing on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and are sensitive to social variation, be it cross-linguistic or language-internal. Three types of contributions are collected in this book. First, it contains theoretical overview papers on the domains that have witnessed expansion in recent years. Second, it presents novel research ideas in proof-of-concept contributions, aimed at blue-sky research and out-of-the-box linguistic analyses. Third, it showcases recent empirical studies within the field. By combining these three types of contributions, the book provides an encompassing overview of novel developments in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.
While cognitive linguists are essentially in agreement on both the conceptual nature and the fundamental importance of metonymy, there remain disagreements on a number of specific but, nevertheless, crucial issues. Research questions include: Is metonymy a relationship between entities or domains ? Is it necessarily referential? What is meant by the claim that metonymy is a stand-for relationship? Can metonymy be considered a mapping? How can it be distinguished from active zones or facets ? Is it a prototype category? The ten contributions of the present volume address such core issues on the basis of the latest research results. The volume is unique in being devoted exclusively to the delimitation of the notion of metonymy without ignoring points of divergence among the various contributors, thus paving the way towards a consensual conception of metonymy."
What do speakers of a language have to know, and what can they 'figure out' on the basis of that knowledge, in order for them to use their language successfully? This is the question at the heart of Construction Grammar, an approach to the study of language that views all dimensions of language as equal contributors to shaping linguistic expressions. The trademark characteristic of Construction Grammar is the insight that language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – constructions – that integrate form and meaning. This textbook shows how a Construction Grammar approach can be used to analyse the English language, offering explanations for language acquisition, variation and change. It covers all levels of syntactic description, from word-formation and inflectional morphology to phrasal and clausal phenomena and information-structure constructions. Each chapter includes exercises and further readings, making it an accessible introduction for undergraduate students of linguistics and English language.
A concise introduction to sociophonetics, this book links research in sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences, and psycholinguistics.
Review text: "Overall, this volume is an important contribution to the development of empirical Cognitive Semantics. This collection of high-quality papers provides the reader with an insight into the most important empirical approaches in corpus-driven semantic research."Natalia Levshina in: Linguist List 20.3011.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. As far as the exact relationship between the cognitive sciences and other fields is concerned, however, it appears that interdisciplinary exchange often remains unrealized, possibly because of the uni-directional application of theories, concepts, and methods, which impedes the productive transfer of knowledge in both directions. In the course of the cognitive turn in the humanities and social sciences, many disciplines have selectively borrowed ideas from core cognitive sciences like psychology and artificial intelligence. The day-to-day practice of interdisciplinarity thus thrives on one-directional borrowings. Focusing on cognitive approaches in linguistics and literary studies, this volume explores "bi-directionality," a genuine transdisciplinary interchange in which both disciplines are borrowing and lending. The contributions take different perspectives on bi-directionality: some extend uni-directional borrowing practices and point to avenues and crossroads, while others critically discuss obstacles, challenges, and limitations to bi-directional transfer."
Linguistic taboo has been relegated for a long time to a peripheral position within Linguistics, due to its social stigmatization and inherent linguistic complexity. Recently, though, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting the phenomenon, especially from cognitive frameworks. This volume is the first collection of papers dealing with linguistic taboo from that perspective. The volume gathers 15 chapters, which provide novel insights into a broad range of taboo phenomena (euphemism, dysphemism, swearing, political correctness, coprolalia, etc.) from the fields of sexuality, diseases, death, war, ageing or religion. With a special focus on lexical semantics, the authors in the volume ...
Spoken by millions of people on four continents, Portuguese remains a lesser studied language. To help improve the linguistic understanding of this pluricentric language, the present volume brings together ten studies about different grammatical phenomena observed in Portuguese varieties – from suffixation to intercalated temporal clauses and non-concatenative verbal inflection, among other topics. Focusing on two main axes – usage and cognition –, these studies draw on the theoretical frameworks of Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, but build a cohesive whole insofar as they all offer usage-based language approaches. By presenting an overview of recent research on Portuguese and its varieties, the book paves the way for the inclusion of Portuguese in the set of Neo-Latin languages best known to the general public.
This book investigates how victims of a large-scale traumatic event converge and diverge in metaphor use in describing their traumatic experiences. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, the book identifies patterns that are shared by this group of trauma victims. By juxtaposing linguistic data with psychometric data, it also explores how metaphor use can vary with the speakers’ psychopathological symptoms. While metaphorical language has been a rare focus in clinical contexts, this book establishes metaphor use as a previously overlooked yet rewarding avenue for studying mental health communication.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book introduces a systematic framework for understanding and investigating lexical variation, using a distributional semantics approach. Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of quantitative analysis of the corpus contexts in which words appear. In this book, the authors explore how count-based token-level semantic vector ...