Conference selection

FTL 2023

Genova, 20-22 September 2023

John Benjamins will be present at FTL 2023. Check out our promotional material and discount order form through the links below. Or come and browse our books at the exhibit. If you wish to talk about our books, your work, and possible publishing projects please get in touch with Ymke Verploegen at ymke.verploegen at benjamins.nl.

Check out our selection of top titles for this conference!


Showing all 40 titles.

HCP 73
Cover not available

Analogy and Contrast in Language

Perspectives from Cognitive Linguistics

Edited by Karolina Krawczak, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Marcin Grygiel

Within cognitive and functional approaches to language structure and grammaticality, analogy and contrast represent two fundamental human cognitive capacities, which, up to now, have mostly been examined separately. This volume seeks to bridge that gap and in doing so it brings together cutting-edge theoretical and... full description
October 2022. xi, 442 pp.
CLSCC 12
Cover not available

Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage

Edited by Iwona Kraska-Szlenk

The volume focuses on body part terms as the vehicle of embodied cognition and conceptualization. It explores the relationship between universal embodiment, language-specific cultural models and linguistic usage practices. The chapters of the volume add to the previous research in a novel way. The presentation of... full description
March 2020. vii, 311 pp.
HCP 74
Cover not available

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. Regarding these prepositions... full description
October 2022. xiii, 242 pp.
HCP 71
Cover not available

Collocations as a Language Resource

A functional and cognitive study in English phraseology

Sonja Poulsen

Are collocations problems or solutions to problems? If you take the perspective of the foreign learner, as in traditional phraseology, they are certainly challenging, and they have therefore been categorized as arbitrary, or even defective, deviations from an assumed norm of full compositionality. This is a paradox... full description
April 2022. xvi, 348 pp.
SCL 43
Cover not available

Colouring Meaning

Collocation and connotation in figurative language

Gill Philip

Primarily focused on idioms and other figurative phraseology, Colouring Meaning describes how the meanings of established phrases are enhanced, refocused and modified in everyday language use. Unlike many studies of creativity in language, this book-length survey addresses the matter at several levels, from the purely... full description
February 2011. xiii, 232 pp.
CLSCC 14
Cover not available

Cultural-Linguistic Explorations into Spirituality, Emotionality, and Society

Edited by Hans-Georg Wolf, Denisa Latić and Anna Finzel

This book offers Cultural-Linguistic explorations into the diverse Lebenswelten of a wide range of cultural contexts, such as South Africa, Hungary, India, Nigeria, China, Romania, Iran, and Poland. The linguistic expedition sets out to explore three thematic segments that were, thus far, under-researched from a... full description
September 2021. vii, 279 pp.
FTL 5
Cover not available

Drawing Attention to Metaphor

Case studies across time periods, cultures and modalities

Edited by Camilla Di Biase-Dyson and Markus Egg

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern... full description
April 2020. v, 265 pp.
MiLCC 9
Cover not available

Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond

Edited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language... full description
September 2022. vii, 359 pp.
FTL 4
Cover not available

Event Structure Metaphors through the Body

Translation from English to American Sign Language

Daniel R. Roush

How do the experiences of people who have different bodies (deaf versus hearing) shape their thoughts and metaphors? Do different linguistic modes of expression (signed versus spoken) have a shaping force as well? This book investigates the metaphorical production of culturally-Deaf translators who work from English... full description
June 2018. xv, 224 pp.
HCP 76
Cover not available

Existential Constructions across Languages

Forms, meanings and functions

Edited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena

This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and... full description
July 2023. x, 352 pp.
FTL 18
Cover not available

Fictive questions in the Zhuangzi

A cognitive rhetorical study

Mingjian Xiang

Rhetoric is intimately related to interaction and cognition. This book explores the cognitive underpinnings of rhetoric by presenting a case study of the rhetorical use of interactional structures, namely expository questions and rhetorical questions, in the classical Chinese tradition. Such questions are generally... full description
May 2023. xiii, 206 pp.
FTL 11
Cover not available

Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage

Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva

Intersubjectivity and usage play central roles in figurative language and are pivotal notions for a cognitively realistic research on figures of thought, speech, and communication. This volume brings together thirteen studies that explore the relationship between figurativity, intersubjectivity and usage from the... full description
May 2021. xii, 442 pp.
FTL 9
Cover not available

Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language

Edited by Annalisa Baicchi

This volume brings together twelve usage-based studies conducted by leading researchers in language and cognition that explore core issues of figurativeness from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The individual chapters reveal the central function of figurativeness in thought and its impact on language. Cognition... full description
August 2020. vii, 311 pp.
FTL 16
Cover not available

Figurative Thought and Language in Action

Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó

The contents of the volume prove the vitality of cognitive linguistic studies of figuration when combined with new research methodologies, in tandem with other disciplines, and also when applied to an ever broader range of topics. Individual chapters are concerned not only with some fundamental issues of defining and... full description
July 2022. vi, 287 pp.
FTL 17
Cover not available

Figurativity and Human Ecology

Edited by Alexandra Bagasheva, Bozhil Hristov and Nelly Tincheva

Figurativity has attracted scholars’ attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. Figurativity and Human Ecology endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language, and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined... full description
November 2022. vi, 307 pp.
FTL 14
Cover not available

Figuring out Figuration

A cognitive linguistic account

María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences, thus bringing... full description
May 2022. ix, 296 pp.
FTL 6
Cover not available

How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science

Edited by Anke Beger and Thomas H. Smith

Metaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts, recordings, and videos, this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science, teaching of science, and how... full description
April 2020. vi, 332 pp.
Z 195
Cover not available

How to do Linguistics with R

Data exploration and statistical analysis

Natalia Levshina

This book provides a linguist with a statistical toolkit for exploration and analysis of linguistic data. It employs R, a free software environment for statistical computing, which is increasingly popular among linguists. How to do Linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis is unique in its scope,... full description
November 2015. xi, 443 pp.
FTL 1
Cover not available

Irony in Language Use and Communication

Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston

The volume provides original research and analyses of the multi-faceted conceptual and verbal process(es) of irony. Key topics explored include interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of irony. Collectively, the papers examine irony from psychology, embodiment studies, philosophy, cognitive... full description
December 2017. x, 282 pp.
CELCR 25
Cover not available

The Language of Food in Japanese

Cognitive perspectives and beyond

Edited by Kiyoko Toratani

Many studies on the language of food examine English or adopt discourse analysis. This volume makes a fresh attempt to analyze Japanese, focusing on non-discursive units. It offers state-of-the-art data-oriented studies, including methods of analysis in line with Cognitive Linguistics. It orchestrates relatable and... full description
February 2022. x, 347 pp.
CLSCC 13
Cover not available

Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life

Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian

The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The... full description
April 2020. viii, 319 pp.
MiLCC 8
Cover not available

Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age

Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language

Edited by Marianna Bolognesi, Mario Brdar and Kristina Š. Despot

This book describes methods, risks, and challenges involved in the construction of metaphor and metonymy digital repositories. The first part of this volume showcases established and new projects around the world in which metaphors and metonymies are harvested and classified. The second part provides a series of... full description
August 2019. x, 263 pp.
CLSCC 11
Cover not available

Metaphor and National Identity

Alternative conceptualization of the Treaty of Trianon

Orsolya Putz

Due to the Treaty of Trianon – which was signed at the end of World War 1 in 1920 – Hungary lost two thirds of its former territory, as well as the inhabitants of these areas. The book aims to reveal why the treaty still plays a role in Hungarian national identity construction, by studying the alternative... full description
December 2019. xvii, 276 pp.
FTL 12
Cover not available

Modeling Irony

A cognitive-pragmatic account

Inés Lozano-Palacio and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez

This book adopts a broad cognitive-pragmatic perspective on irony which sees ironic meaning as the result of complex inferential activity arising from conflicting conceptual scenarios. This view of irony is the basis for an analytically productive integrative account capable of bridging gaps among disciplines and of... full description
February 2022. ix, 173 pp.
MiLCC 10
Cover not available

Motion Metaphors in Music Criticism

An empirical investigation of their conceptual motivation and their metaphoricity

Nina Julich-Warpakowski

The book explores (1) the motivation of motion expressions in Western classical music criticism in terms of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) in two corpus studies, and (2) their perceived degree of metaphoricity among musicians and non-musicians in a rating study. The results show that while... full description
November 2022. xiii, 247 pp.
FTL 2
Cover not available

Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy in Advertising

Paula Pérez Sobrino

Metaphor and metonymy appeal to us because they evoke mental images in unique but still recognisable ways. The potential for figurative thought exists in everyone, and it pervades our everyday social interactions. In particular, advertising offers countless opportunities to explore the way in which people think... full description
December 2017. vii, 232 pp.
FTL 13
Cover not available

The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor

Elisa Gironzetti

This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor, advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic, face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor, smiling, and gaze, and shows... full description
April 2022. xix, 235 pp.
HCP 72
Cover not available

Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description

Deixis, asymmetries, constructions

Edited by Laure Sarda and Benjamin Fagard

The idea of this book on "Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description" comes from the observation that, over the last 30 years, much attention has been devoted to the manner/path divide in relation to the distinction between Verb-Framed and Satellite-Framed languages. This mainstream focus has left aside other... full description
July 2022. vii, 279 pp.
FTL 7
Cover not available

Performing Metaphoric Creativity across Modes and Contexts

Edited by Laura Hidalgo-Downing and Blanca Kraljevic Mujic

The creative potentiality of metaphor is one of the central themes in research on creativity. The present volume offers a space for the interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between metaphor and creativity by focusing on (re)contextualization across modes and socio-cultural contexts and on the performative... full description
May 2020. xi, 346 pp.
FTL 15
Cover not available

Poetic Metaphors

Creativity and interpretation

Carina Rasse

Poetry pushes metaphor to the limit. Consider how many different, dynamic, and interconnected dimensions (e.g., text, rhyme, rhythm, sound, and many more) a poem has, and how they all play a role in the ways (metaphorical) meaning is constructed. There is probably no other genre that relies so much on the creator’s... full description
June 2022. xvii, 190 pp.
LAL 30
Cover not available

The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter

Edited by Manuel Jobert and Sandrine Sorlin

The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter is the first book-length study analysing irony and banter together. This approach, inherited from Geoffrey Leech’s research, implies that the two notions are intrinsically related. In this thought-provoking volume, the various contributors (linguists, stylisticians, discourse... full description
April 2018. vi, 221 pp.
FTL 10
Cover not available

Producing Figurative Expression

Theoretical, experimental and practical perspectives

Edited by John Barnden and Andrew Gargett

This collection contains a selection of recent work on people’s production of figurative language (metaphoric, ironic, metonymic, hyperbolic, ...) and similarly of figurative expression in visual media and artefact design. The articles illuminate issues such as why and under what circumstances people produce... full description
December 2020. viii, 549 pp.
Z 217
Cover not available

Progress in Colour Studies

Cognition, language and beyond

Edited by Lindsay W. MacDonald, Carole P. Biggam and Galina V. Paramei

This volume presents authoritative and up-to-date research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines, including vision science, psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, anthropology, onomastics, philosophy, archaeology and design. The chapters have been developed from papers and... full description
November 2018. xx, 470 pp.
FTL 8
Cover not available

Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics

Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska

The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, puns, irony) while others deal with issues... full description
May 2020. vii, 357 pp.
CELCR 24
Cover not available

Sensory Experiences

Exploring meaning and the senses

Danièle Dubois, Caroline Cance, Matt Coler, Arthur Paté and Catherine Guastavino

Sensory Experiences: Exploring meaning and the senses describes the collective elaboration of a situated cognitive approach with an emphasis on the relations between language and cognition within and across different sensory modalities and practices. This approach, grounded in 40 years of empirical research, is a... full description
December 2021. xxv, 598 pp.
CELCR 26
Cover not available

Slowing Metaphor Down

Elaborating Deliberate Metaphor Theory

Gerard J. Steen

If thinking can be fast or slow, metaphorical thinking can be fast and slow too. But metaphorical thinking does not occur as often and in the ways that many metaphor scholars today think. Slow metaphorical thinking does mean, however, that we can exert more control over metaphor than has previously been acknowledged.... full description
June 2023. xv, 355 pp.
HCP 75
Cover not available

Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity

Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression?... full description
November 2022. viii, 245 pp.
DAPSAC 85
Cover not available

Variation in Political Metaphor

Edited by Julien Perrez, Min Reuchamps and Paul H. Thibodeau

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade, to shape expectations, to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of... full description
August 2019. vi, 212 pp.
CELCR 23
Cover not available

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 feature matching... full description
November 2020. xi, 208 pp.
FTL 3
Cover not available

The Poetics of Time – Metaphors and Blends in Language and Literature

Anna Piata

How does the concept of time, elusive and inconceivable as it may be, lend itself to verbal creativity? Is it possible to trace something like a “poetics of time”? This book embarks on this endeavor initiated by the assumption that verbal creativity can shed some new light on our understanding of time, challenging... full description
February 2018. xviii, 206 pp.