Motivation in Language

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 chapters, this book combines theoretical reflection with empirical analyses of how motivatedness shapes morphosyntactic form, semantic change, and metaphor. The studies draw on synchronic and diachronic data from several languages and examine phenomena ranging from body-part semantics, grammatical change, and lexical blending to music discourse, online pet memorials, and the language of comics. By bringing language-internal explanations into dialogue with cognitive, communicative, embodied, historical, and sociocultural accounts, the book advances research on the limits of arbitrariness and presents motivation as a broad explanatory perspective on language structure and use. This volume will interest scholars, advanced students, and anyone concerned with cognitive linguistics, meaning, language change, discourse, and multimodality.