Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

In recent years, research in cognitive linguistics has expanded its interests to cover a variety of texts – spoken, written, or multimodal. Analytical tools such as conceptual metaphor, frame semantics, mental spaces and grammatical constructions have been productively applied in various discourse contexts. In this volume, originally published as a special issue of English Text Construction 3:2 (2010), the contributors, a mix of established and emerging authors in the field, analyse broadcast and print journalism, argumentative scientific discourse, radio lectures on music, and the main literary genres (the poetry of Szymborska and bpNichol, the drama of Shakespeare, the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf and recent fiction by John Banville). Collectively the findings suggest a need to broaden and refine the cognitive linguistic repertoire, while also uncovering new ways to interpret textual data. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students with interests in cognitive poetics and linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and construction grammar.

In contemporary linguistics, both cognitive and critical approaches to language have been elaborated in some detail. Unfortunately, the two perspectives have seldom converged, despite the potential theoretical advances such collaboration offers. The contributions to this volume explore the convergence of cognitive and critical trends in the guise of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis. The volume addresses a range of socio-political discourses in various international contexts, including discourses on nation, education, immigration, and war. One single integrated model is not presented, but rather, a number of methodologies are developed and assessed across the chapters. The application of established cognitive linguistic theories, including conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending theory and frame semantics, are discussed, as well as developing theories, such as metaphor power theory and discourse space theory. The book is of value to anyone interested in the interaction between language, mind, and society, including both students and scholars of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Analysing language data systematically and looking closely at how people formulate their thoughts can reveal astonishing insights about the human mind. Without presupposing specific subject knowledge, this book gently introduces its readers to theoretical insights as well as practical principles for systematic linguistic analysis from a cognitive perspective. Drawing on Thora Tenbrink's twenty years' experience in both linguistics and cognitive science, this book offers theoretical guidance and practical advice for doing cognitive discourse analysis. It covers areas of analysis as diverse as attention, perspective, granularity, certainty, inference, transformation, communication, and cognitive strategies, using inspiring examples from many different projects. Simple techniques and tools are used to allow readers new to the subject easy ways to apply the methods, without the need for complex technologies, whilst the cross-disciplinary approach can be applied to a diverse range of research purposes and contexts in which language and thought play a role.

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.