BISAC SubjectsLANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics

Motivation in Language: A cognitive perspective

Edited by Grzegorz Drożdż and Barbara Taraszka-Drożdż

Why do languages take the forms they do, and why do speakers choose particular expressions to construct meaning? This volume addresses these questions from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, viewing motivation as the outcome of interacting linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Across twelve… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 83] 2027. vi, 314 pp. + index

Contrasting English and Polish Emotion Clusters

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Paul A. Wilson

Understanding how emotions are clustered and labelled across languages offers fascinating insights into cultural differences and universals. This book delves into this very topic, analysing similarities and contrasts between Polish and English grouping and categorising emotions.The book combines a… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 80] 2026. xxii, 382 pp.

Thinking and Speaking About Time: A cognitive linguistic approach

Edited by Rita Brdar Szabó and Mario Brdar

The last two decades have seen a series of publications focused on time. So, why another book? It now appears that a kairos moment has arrived to reconsider from a more holistic point of view the manifold ways in which we think about time and talk about it. The book is divided into four major… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 81] 2026. viii, 477 pp.

This is the Thing: A cognitive/typological investigation into the concept of ‘thinghood’

Michael Fortescue

This monograph investigates for the first time words like ‘thing’ of maximal semantic generality across languages. Not all languages have exact equivalents of English ‘thing’ – in some, for instance, the nearest equivalent is an interrogative stem (‘what?’). Few languages extend their ‘thing’ words… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 79] 2026. ix, 220 pp.

Possibility and Necessity: Concepts and expressions of modality

Edited by Jean Albrespit, Christelle Lacassain and Tracey Simpson

Researchers in the fields of logic, philosophy and linguistics have for many years been pondering over the elusive nature of modality and grappled with ways of capturing it. This book provides a broad overview of issues relevant to the study of modality and reflects the diversity of theoretical… read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 237] 2025. vi, 370 pp.

Cognitive Semantics: A cultural-historical perspective

Vladimir Glebkin

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material.… read more

[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 15] 2024. v, 242 pp.

The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English: A corpus-based study of grammatical change

Xinyue Yao

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings… read more

[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 114] 2024. xvii, 235 pp.

Proverbs within Cognitive Linguistics: State of the art

Edited by Sadia Belkhir

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date, there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters… read more

[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 16] 2024. xvi, 351 pp.

Space, Time, World

Michael Fortescue

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference”, these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages, nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD, which has its own corresponding frames of… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 77] 2024. viii, 223 pp

The Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect in Discourse

Lukas Müller

This monograph presents a theoretical and empirical study of the Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect (PP). The innovative claim is that the two tense forms operate in the field of tension between temporal quantification and temporal reference. Based on this approach, it presents the first… read more

[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 279] 2023. xviii, 276 pp.

Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective

Edited by Anna Margetts, Sonja Riesberg and Birgit Hellwig

This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 134] 2022. viii, 437 pp.

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks

Maria Brenda and Jolanta Mazurkiewicz-Sokołowska

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.… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 74] 2022. xiii, 242 pp.

Pejorative Suffixes and Combining Forms in English

José A. Sánchez Fajardo

The book is a research monograph that reviews and revises the concept of linguistic pejoration, and explores the role of 15 suffixes and combining forms, such as -ie, -o, -ard, -holic, -rrhea, -itis, -porn, -ish, in the formation of English pejoratives. The examination of the inner structure of the… read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 222] 2022. xvi, 229 pp.

The Typology of Physical Qualities

Edited by Ekaterina Rakhilina, Tatiana Reznikova and Daria Ryzhova

What is it like? – This is often the first question we ask about any object, and it is typically answered with adjectives: old, smooth, pointed, narrow, etc. Characteristics of things around us is a fundamental aspect of how we conceptualize the physical world, regardless of when or where we live –… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 133] 2022. vi, 339 pp.

Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic resources at work

Edited by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria

This book addresses the topic of linguistic categorization from a novel perspective. While most of the early research has focused on how linguistic systems reflect some pre-existing ways of categorizing experience, the contributions included in this volume seek to understand how linguistic… read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 220] 2021. vi, 467 pp.

Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions

Edited by Yo Matsumoto and Kazuhiro Kawachi

Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 69] 2020. vii, 324 pp.

Where Words Get their Meaning: Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language

Marianna Bolognesi

Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and… read more

[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 23] 2020. xi, 208 pp.

Perception Metaphors

Edited by Laura J. Speed, Carolyn O'Meara, Lila San Roque and Asifa Majid

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another, ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena, for example, ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and… read more

[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 19] 2019. vii, 382 pp.

The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French: Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression

Edited by Michel Aurnague and Dejan Stosic

Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986, 1991) work on static prepositions. However, interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space, whose syntactic properties… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 66] 2019. ix, 396 pp.

Conceptual Metonymy: Methodological, theoretical, and descriptive issues

Edited by Olga Blanco Carrión, Antonio Barcelona and Rossella Pannain

The volume addresses a number of closely connected methodological, descriptive, and theoretical issues in the study of metonymy, and includes a series of case studies broadening our knowledge of the functioning of metonymy. As regards the methodological and descriptive issues, the book exhibits a… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 60] 2018. ix, 325 pp.

Constructicography: Constructicon development across languages

Edited by Benjamin Lyngfelt, Lars Borin, Kyoko Ohara and Tiago Timponi Torrent

In constructionist theory, a constructicon is an inventory of constructions making up the full set of linguistic units in a language. In applied practice, it is a set of construction descriptions – a “dictionary of constructions”. The development of constructicons in the latter sense typically… read more

[Constructional Approaches to Language, 22] 2018. viii, 313 pp. | open access

Evidence for Evidentiality

Edited by Ad Foolen, Helen de Hoop and Gijs Mulder

Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question, language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception, inference from other information, ‘hearsay’, etc. Such expressions,… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 61] 2018. vii, 313 pp.

Landscape and Culture – Cross-linguistic Perspectives

Helen Bromhead

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This ground-breaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the… read more

[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 9] 2018. xii, 227 pp.

Lexical meaning as a testable hypothesis: The case of English look, see, seem and appear

Nadav Sabar

This book offers an original treatment of the lexical form look. The work is innovative in that it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning – hitherto found primarily in grammar – is equally operative in core vocabulary items like look and see. The upshot is that… read more

[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 75] 2018. xv, 144 pp.

Semantics in Language Acquisition

Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam

This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical… read more

[Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 24] 2018. vi, 391 pp.

Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives

Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari

After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 197] 2018. viii, 366 pp.

Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar

Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma

As language is a multifaceted phenomenon, the study of language, as long as it is geared at providing a comprehensive picture of it, cannot be restricted to one component or one approach. This applies to the many different components of language as well, including semantics.If we want to fully… read more

[Not in series, 210] 2017. viii, 329 pp.

Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and applications

Edited by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event… read more

[Human Cognitive Processing, 59] 2017. xiv, 460 pp.

Negation and Contact: With special focus on Singapore English

Edited by Debra Ziegeler and Zhiming Bao

The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas, such as negative raising, negative concord, and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a… read more

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 183] 2017. vii, 208 pp.

Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism

Giacomo Turbanti

The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two.… read more

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 280] 2017. xi, 245 pp.

Uralic Essive and the Expression of Impermanent State

Edited by Casper de Groot

This volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume… read more

[Typological Studies in Language, 119] 2017. xix, 555 pp.

Semantic Structure in English

Jim Feist

Syntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual… read more

[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 73] 2016. xv, 452 pp. | open access

Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP: Studies in honour of Heribert Picht

Edited by Bassey E. Antia

This book deals with the oft-neglected tensions between perspicuity and fuzziness in specialised communication. It describes the manifestations, functions and implications of indeterminacy phenomena in a range of LSP specialisations where it has been customary to expect precision and consistency.… read more

[Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 8] 2007. xxii, 236 pp.