This textbook is designed for advanced (graduate and postgraduate) students, and will also be of interest to scholars. It blends a cognitive linguistic approach to language and language use with insights from contemporary pragmatics, the ultimate aim being to advance a unified model of cognitive pragmatics. Basic themes in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics are covered ranging from figurative language and thought, e.g. conceptual metaphor and metonymy, the role of inferencing in the construction of meaning, in particular, indirect speech acts, to the conceptual and functional motivation of morphosyntactic structure. Finally, the book offers many suggestions and ideas for student papers as well as larger research projects that promise to reveal new insights into conceptual structure, communicative function, and their influence on the grammatical structure of language.

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

This textbook is designed for advanced (graduate and postgraduate) students, and will also be of interest to scholars. It blends a cognitive linguistic approach to language and language use with insights from contemporary pragmatics, the ultimate aim being to advance a unified model of cognitive pragmatics. Basic themes in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics are covered ranging from figurative language and thought, e.g. conceptual metaphor and metonymy, the role of inferencing in the construction of meaning, in particular, indirect speech acts, to the conceptual and functional motivation of morphosyntactic structure. Finally, the book offers many suggestions and ideas for student papers as well as larger research projects that promise to reveal new insights into conceptual structure, communicative function, and their influence on the grammatical structure of language.

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. 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 best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies. The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas: • Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar; • Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others; • Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography; • New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies. The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

This book provides a good overview of philosophical and cognitive approaches to language use and meaning. A synthesis of such approaches leads to a dynamic concept of pragmatic meaning which is on the one hand grounded in cognition and motivated by linguistic and cultural convention and, on the other, creates a framework for studying the interactive and social dimensions of the development of meaning in linguistic communication. Through an experientialist approach based on connectionist models, the author shows that by internalizing pragmatic meaning people become social agents who reproduce, challenge or change their social parameters during interaction.Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition is suitable as a course book in Pragmatics and Semantics and of interest to those concerned with cognitive models and dynamic and social aspects of linguistic communication.