A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to, German zu, Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions, the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings, the authors show how senso-motoric functioning, life experience, individual knowledge, imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the conference Cognitive Approaches to English, an international event organized to mark the 30th anniversary of English studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, which was held in Osijek on October 18–19, 2007. The participants were invited to discuss issues in cognitive accounts of English, ranging from fundamental to methodological to interdisciplinary and applied. The volume is accordingly divided into four parts. Part I, Motivation in grammar, deals with various phenomena in the grammar of English in the broadest sense of the term, all of which are shown to be motivated by metaphorical and/or metonymic operations. Part II, Constructing meaning (between grammar and lexicon), contains five chapters dealing with phenomena ranging from various peculiarities of form-meaning pairings (such as synonymy, polysemy, and figurative meanings) to concept formation. The four chapters that make up Part III are concerned with the phenomenon of interlinguistic and intercultural variation in the use of metaphorical and metonymic processes. The volume is concluded by Part IV, the three papers of which attempt to reconsider some TEFL issues from a cognitive linguistic point of view.

Specialist languages, such as the languages of law, business, aviation, football, and politics, can be perceived as highly conventionalized, semi-natural and not fully autonomous communication codes limited to specific, and predominantly formal, situations. A large number of them can be best characterized by subject matter and semantic content, but the most important distinctive element in their make-up is the frame of context in which they are embedded. This volume discusses various ways of approaching the problems associated with the very broad phenomenon of specialist languages by means of the analytical mechanisms and theoretical conceptions developed within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The volume includes research carried out by world-renowned experts in the field.

As a usage-based language theory, cognitive linguistics is predestined to have an impact on applied research in such areas as language in society, ideology, language acquisition, language pedagogy. The present volumes are a first systematic attempt to carve out pathways from the links between language and cognition to the fields of language acquisition and language pedagogy and to deal with them in one coherent framework: applied cognitive linguistics.

In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with the main issues of a pedagogical grammar. A pedagogical grammar aims at providing all the essential linguistic patterns considered relevant by theoretical and descriptive linguistics for the preparation of teaching materials and their exploitation in foreign language instruction. The volume contains thirteen contributions organized into three parts. In Part 1 Langacker, Taylor and Broccias introduce the basic grammar concepts, rules and models that are available in cognitive linguistics and which are directly relevant to the construction of a pedagogical grammar. Meunier, on the other hand, describes how such a grammar could benefit from corpus linguistics. Part 2 looks at some cognitive tools and conceptual errors with contributions by Danesi and Maldonado and also reconsiders contrastive analysis in the papers by Ruiz de Mendoza and Valenzuela & Rojo. Part 3, finally, discusses language-specific constraints on a number of linguistic phenomena such as the construal of motion events (papers by Cadierno and De Knop & Dirven), distinctions in the tense-aspect system (papers by Niemeier & Reif and Schmiedtová & Flecken), and voice (Chen & Oller).

Historically, the social aspects of language use have been considered the domain of social psychology, while the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. Recently, it has become increasingly clear that these two dimensions are highly interrelated: cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors, such as beliefs about one's interlocutors and politeness norms, and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research integrating the social and cognitive dimensions which has greatly increased our understanding of human language use. Each chapter in this volume demonstrates how the theoretical approaches and research methods of social and cognitive psychology can be successfully interwoven to provide insight into one or more fundamental questions about the process of interpersonal communication. The topics under investigation include the nature and role of speaker intentions in the communicative process, the production and comprehension of indirect speech and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational collaboration, and the relationships between language, cognition, culture, and social interaction. The book will be of interest to all those who study interpersonal language use: social and cognitive psychologists, theoretical and applied linguists, and communication researchers.

The study of adverbial clauses in Portuguese is related to the fact that the Portuguese speaker may chose between three different structures, i.e. the adverbial clause may contain the plain infinitive, the inflected infinitive or a finite verb form. In the field of Portuguese Linguistics, the analysis of these structures has traditionally been conducted from a Generative Grammar perspective postulating abstract rules and transformations in order to explain the variation between these structures. As a result, focus has been put on purely structural aspects, while conceptual differences have been highly neglected. The present book challenges this view of linguistic analysis. Instead of proposing a general semantic content for finite and infinitive adverbial clauses in Portuguese—traditionally based on notions like deep structure and surface structure—the hypothesis put forward is that these clauses evoke different meanings and that the use of one adverbial structure or another can be explained by the context in which it occurs and by the conceptual content it designates. From a Cognitive Grammar perspective of linguistic analysis, it is shown that Portuguese adverbial structures illustrate the iconic nature of language and that their conceptual meaning can be explained by notions such as prominence, mental spaces, control and subjectification.

Studying narratives is often the best way to gain a good understanding of how various aspects of human information are organized and integrated—the narrator employs specific informational methods to build the whole structure of a narrative through combining temporally constructed events in light of an array of relationships to the narratee and these methods reveal the interaction of the rational and the sensitive aspects of human information. Computational and Cognitive Approaches to Narratology discusses issues of narrative-related information and communication technologies, cognitive mechanism and analyses, and theoretical perspectives on narratives and the story generation process. Focusing on emerging research as well as applications in a variety of fields including marketing, philosophy, psychology, art, and literature, this timely publication is an essential reference source for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in various information technology, cognitive studies, design, and creative fields.

This book is intended as a theoretical and practical resource for both new and experienced teachers of a second language. It integrates some of the ideas from cognitive linguistics into existing classroom approaches for teaching English as a second language through a series of lesson plans developed by teachers of English from Mainland China and Hong Kong. The lesson plans provide step-by-step instructions for teachers, including resources and an explanation of the theories underpinning each step. These plans, many of which are integrated into specific English as a foreign language textbook units, encourage teachers to be creative by adding or adapting the material they have in order to engage their students. Although the main audience is English teachers, the theoretical principles covered are applicable to teachers of any foreign language and the practical examples, provided in the lesson plans, can be easily modified to teach other languages as well. Similarly, it is not just for teachers working in Chinese contexts but for anyone interested in embodied cognition as a teaching approach. I intend these pages to serve as a companion for teachers to reflect on their existing practices, to provide new ideas and to make them aware of the many factors affecting learning.