This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse, as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab, Dutch, British, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Israeli, Swedish, US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics, the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics, particularly multimodality, cognition, context, genre and recipient design.

The volume argues for the use of multi-methodological strategies in linguistic research. In its lead chapter, in addition, the thorny issue of phenomenological pluralism is explored in detail. From a usage-based perspective, the individual chapters demonstrate methodological pluralism in the investigation of meaning, language acquisition, and discourse. The chapters report on studies in which the use of corpus data is combined with other methodological tools, e.g. experimentally elicited findings, showing how introspection and the analysis of performance data go hand in hand to provide empirical support for researchers hypotheses. Some of the authors inspire the discussion in usage-based linguistics, proposing innovative methods of analysis. Others adopt such methods and combine them in original ways. The cutting-edge studies presented in this volume should be of great interest to scholars and students of cognitive and corpus linguistics who want to familiarize themselves with recent methodological advances and their applications in the field."

Learning About Language is an exciting and ambitious series of introductions to fundamental topics in language, linguistics and related areas. The books are designed for students of linguistics and those who are studying language as part of a wider course. Cognitive Linguistics explores the idea that language reflects our experience of the world. It shows that our ability to use language is closely related to other cognitive abilities such as categorization, perception, memory and attention allocation. Concepts and mental images expressed and evoked by linguistic means are linked by conceptual metaphors and metonymies and merged into more comprehensive cognitive and cultural models, frames or scenarios. It is only against this background that human communication makes sense. After 25 years of intensive research, cognitive-linguistic thinking now holds a firm place both in the wider linguistic and the cognitive-science communities. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics carefully explains the central concepts of categoriza­tion, of prototype and gestalt perception, of basic level and conceptual hierarchies, of figure and ground, and of metaphor and metonymy, for which an innovative description is provided. It also brings together issues such as iconicity, lexical change, grammaticalization and language teaching that have profited considerably from being put on a cognitive basis. The second edition of this popular introduction provides a comprehensive and accessible up-to-date overview of Cognitive Linguistics: Clarifies the basic notions supported by new evidence and examples for their application in language learning Discusses major recent developments in the field: the increasing attention paid to metonymies, Construction Grammar, Conceptual Blending and its role in online-processing. Explores links with neighbouring fields like Relevance Theory Uses many diagrams and illustrations to make the theoretical argument more tangible Includes extended exercises Provides substantial updated suggestions for further reading.

This concise bibliography on Sign Languages was compiled on the occasion of the 20th International Congress of Linguists in Cape Town, South Africa, July 2018. The selection of titles is drawn from the Linguistic Bibliography and gives an overview of scholarship on Sign language over the past 10 years. The introduction is by Myriam Vermeerbergen (KU Leuven & Stellenbosch University) and Anna-Lena Nilsson (NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology) discusses the most recent developments in the field. The Linguistic Bibliography is compiled under the editorial management of Eline van der Veken, René Genis and Anne Aarssen in Leiden, The Netherlands. Linguistic Bibliography Online is the most comprehensive bibliography for scholarship on languages and theoretical linguistics available. Updated monthly with a total of more than 20,000 records annually, it enables users to trace recent publications and provides overviews of older material. For more information on Linguistic Bibliography and Linguistic Bibliography Online, please visit brill.com/lbo and linguisticbibliography.com. The e-book version of this bibliography is available in Open Access on brill.com.

Speakers tend to compose their utterances in such a way that the message they want to get across is hardly ever fully encoded by the meanings of the words and the grammar they use. Instead speakers rely on hearers adding conceptual and emotive content while interpreting the contextually appropriate meanings and intentions behind utterances. This insight, which is of course particularly relevant in all kinds of indirect, figurative or humorous talk, lies at the heart of the linguistic discipline of pragmatics. If pragmatics is the study of meaning-in-context, then cognitive pragmatics can be broadly defined as encompassing the study of the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meaning-in-context. While it would seem only natural that pragmatics as such should have addressed such cognitive issues anyway, it has mainly been due to the historical rooting of this discipline in the philosophy of language that psychological aspects have not been in the pragmatic limelight to date. Being part of the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this volume is the first to systematically survey this terrain from a wide range of perspectives. It collects state-of-the-art contributions by leading experts from the fields of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical linguistics and historical linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts which tackle the following questions: Part I: The cognitive principles of pragmatic competence What are the general cognitive principles underlying pragmatic competence, i.e. the skill to arrive at context-dependent meanings of utterances? What are the cognitive underpinnings of language users' ability to compute or infer intended meanings in the role of hearers and to give hints as to how to decode intended meanings in the role of speakers? Part II: The psychology of pragmatics What are the actual cognitive processes taking place during online construal of meaning-in-context on the basis of encoded messages? How is pragmatic competence acquired in childhood? What are the types, sources and effects of pragmatic disorders, i.e. impairments of pragmatic competence? Part III: The construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context What are the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meanings of non-explicit and indirect utterances? How do we process figurative meanings, humour and gestures? Part IV: The emergence of linguistic structures from meaning-in-context What are the repercussions of the (repeated) construal of context-dependent meanings on linguistic structures and the linguistic system? How does the system change under the influence of the construal of meanings in social situations? Reduced series price (print) available! [email protected].

Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories as well as concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The articles provide both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of research in pragmatics. Topics are thus not only considered within their scholarly context but are also critically evaluated from current perspectives.