The volume presents an overview of recent cognitive linguistic research on Slavic languages. Slavic languages, with their rich inflectional morphology in both the nominal and the verbal system, provide an important testing ground for a linguistic theory that seeks to motivate linguistic structure. Therefore, the volume touches upon a wide range of phenomena: it addresses issues related to the semantics of grammatical case, tense, aspect, voice and word order, it looks into grammaticalization and language change and discusses sound symbolism. At the same time, the analyses presented address a variety of theoretically important issues. Take for example the role of virtual entities in language or that of iconic motivation in grammar, the importance of metaphor for grammaticalization or that of subjectification for motivating synchronic polysemy and diachronic language change, as well as the myriad of patterns available to encode events in a non-canonical way or to convey the speaker's epistemic stance with respect to the communicated content. In addition, the analyses are couched in a variety of cognitive linguistic frameworks, such as cognitive grammar, mental space theory, construction grammar, frame semantics, grammaticalization theory, as well as prototype semantics. All in all, the analyses presented in this volume enrich the understanding of established aspects of the cognitive model of language and may serve as catalysts for their further development and refinement, making the volume a worthwhile read for Slavic and cognitive linguists alike.

This volume takes stock of current research in contrastive lexical studies. It reflects the growing interest in corpus-based approaches to the study of lexis, in particular the use of multilingual corpora, shared by researchers working in widely differing fields - contrastive linguistics, lexicology, lexicography, terminology, computational linguistics and machine translation. The articles in the volume, which cover a wide diversity of languages, are divided into four main sections: the exploration of cross-linguistic equivalence, contrastive lexical semantics, corpus-based multilingual lexicography, and translation and parallel concordancing. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to recent trends in contrastive lexical studies written by the editors of the volume, Bengt Altenberg and Sylviane Granger.

The papers in this collection throw fresh light on the relation between language contact and contrastive linguistics. The book focuses equally on the mutual influence of linguistic systems in contact and on the language contrasts that govern the linguistic behaviour of the bilingual speaker.