Conference selection

ISGS 2022

Chicago, USA, July 13-15, 2022

John Benjamins will be virtually present at ISGS. 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 patricia.leplae at benjamins.nl.

Check out our selection of top titles for this conference!


Showing all 42 titles.

AiCR 94
Cover not available

The Abstraction Engine

Extracting patterns in language, mind and brain

Michael Fortescue

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various... full description
April 2017. vi, 192 pp.
BCT 99
Cover not available

Applying Cognitive Linguistics

Figurative language in use, constructions and typology

Edited by Ana M. Piquer-Píriz and Rafael Alejo-González

In recent years, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has established itself not only as a solid theoretical approach but also as an important source from which different applications to other fields have emerged. In this volume we identify some of the current, most relevant topics in applied CL-oriented studies – analyses of... full description
August 2018. vi, 230 pp.
HCP 62
Cover not available

Aspectuality across Languages

Event construal in speech and gesture

Edited by Alan Cienki and Olga K. Iriskhanova

The book provides a nuanced, multimodal perspective on how people express events via certain grammatical forms of verbs in speech and certain qualities of movement in manual gestures. The volume is the outcome of an international project that involved three teams: one each from France, Germany, and Russia, including... full description
October 2018. xviii, 221 pp.
AiCR 81
Cover not available

Becoming Human

From pointing gestures to syntax

Teresa Bejarano

What do the pointing gesture, the imitation of new complex motor patterns, the evocation of absent objects and the grasping of others’ false beliefs all have in common? Apart from being (one way or other) involved in the language, they all would share a demanding requirement – a second mental centre within the subject.full description
July 2011. xvii, 402 pp.
AiCR 84
Cover not available

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement

Edited by Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, Michela Summa and Cornelia Müller

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology,... full description
January 2012. vii, 468 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.
Z 201
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Concise Lexicon for Sign Linguistics

Jan Nijen Twilhaar and Beppie van den Bogaerde

This extensive, well-researched and clearly formatted lexicon of a wide variety of linguistic terms is a long overdue. It is an extremely welcome addition to the bookshelves of sign language teachers, interpreters, linguists, learners and other sign language users, and of course of the Deaf themselves.Unique to this... full description
June 2016. xi, 230 pp.
GS 8
Cover not available

Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy

Josef Fulka

The book represents a historical overview of the way the topic of gesture and sign language has been treated in the 18th century French philosophy. The texts treated are grouped into several categories based on the view they present of deafness and gesture. While some of those texts obviously view deafness and sign... full description
April 2020. vii, 166 pp.
GS 6
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Developments in Primate Gesture Research

Edited by Simone Pika and Katja Liebal

The book is a themed, mutually referenced collection of articles from a very high-powered set of authors based on the workshop on “Current developments in non-human primate gesture research”, which was held in July 2010 at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. The motivation for this book –... full description
June 2012. xiii, 256 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.
GS 5
Cover not available

Elements of Meaning in Gesture

Geneviève Calbris

Summarizing her pioneering work on the semiotic analysis of gestures in conversational settings, Geneviève Calbris offers a comprehensive account of her unique perspective on the relationship between gesture, speech, and thought. She highlights the various functions of gesture and especially shows how various gestural... full description
November 2011. xx, 378 pp.
HCP 61
Cover not available

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, grammatical or lexical,... full description
July 2018. vii, 313 pp.
AIS 10
Cover not available

Eye-tracking in Interaction

Studies on the role of eye gaze in dialogue

Edited by Geert Brône and Bert Oben

This volume presents a state-of-the-art of current research on the role of eye gaze in different types of interaction, including human-human and human-computer interaction. Approaching the phenomenon from different disciplinary and methodological angles, the chapters in the volume are united through a shared... full description
November 2018. vi, 329 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.
Z 188
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From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance

Essays in honor of Adam Kendon

Edited by Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Marianne Gullberg

Language use is fundamentally multimodal. Speakers use their hands to point to locations, to represent content and to comment on ongoing talk; they position their bodies to show their orientation and stance in interaction; they use facial displays to comment on what is being said; and they engage in mutual gaze to... full description
August 2014. ix, 379 pp.
GS 1
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Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language

Essays in honor of David McNeill

Edited by Susan D. Duncan, Justine Cassell and Elena T. Levy

Each of the 21 chapters in this volume reflects a view of language as a dynamic phenomenon with emergent structure, and in each, gesture is approached as part of language, not an adjunct to it. In this, all of the authors have been influenced by David McNeill's methods for studying natural discourse and by his theory... full description
June 2007. vi, 328 pp.
GS 2
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Gesturecraft

The manu-facture of meaning

Jürgen Streeck

The craft of gesture is part of the practical equipment with which we inhabit and understand the world together. Drawing on micro-ethnographic research in diverse interaction settings, this book explores the communicative ecologies in which hand-gestures appear: illuminating the world around us, depicting it, making... full description
April 2009. xii, 235 pp.
BCT 112
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How the Brain Got Language – Towards a New Road Map

Edited by Michael A. Arbib

How did humans evolve biologically so that our brains and social interactions could support language processes, and how did cultural evolution lead to the invention of languages (signed as well as spoken)? This book addresses these questions through comparative (neuro)primatology – comparative study of brain, behavior... full description
August 2020. vii, 393 pp.
Z 195
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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.
GS 4
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Integrating Gestures

The interdisciplinary nature of gesture

Edited by Gale Stam and Mika Ishino

Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans.... full description
June 2011. viii, 372 pp.
GS 9
Cover not available

Italian Sign Language from a Cognitive and Socio-semiotic Perspective

Implications for a general language theory

Virginia Volterra, Maria Roccaforte, Alessio Di Renzo and Sabina Fontana

This volume reveals new insights on the faculty of language. By proposing a new approach in the analysis and description of Italian Sign Language (LIS), that can be extended also to other sign languages, this book also enlightens some aspects of spoken languages, which were often overlooked in the past and only... full description
September 2022. vi, 220 pp.
Z 199
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The Linguistics of Sign Languages

An introduction

Edited by Anne E. Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde, Roland Pfau and Trude Schermer

How different are sign languages across the world? Are individual signs and signed sentences constructed in the same way across these languages? What are the rules for having a conversation in a sign language? How do children and adults learn a sign language? How are sign languages processed in the brain? These... full description
June 2016. xv, 378 pp.
HCP 63
Cover not available

Mental Models across Languages

The visual representation of baldness terms in German, English, and Japanese

Pawel Sickinger

This book presents a study that triangulates the meanings of expressions across English, German and Japanese via their perception-based conceptual representations. In an online experiment, native speakers of the three languages were asked to design visual representations of expressions referring to baldness phenomena.... full description
December 2018. xv, 328 pp.
GS 3
Cover not available

Metaphor and Gesture

Edited by Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller

This volume is the first to offer an overview on metaphor and gesture — a new multi-disciplinary area of research. Scholars of metaphor have been paying increasing attention to spontaneous gestures with speech; meanwhile, researchers in gesture studies have been focussing on the abstract ideas which receive physical... full description
June 2008. ix, 306 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.
AICR 89
Cover not available

Moving Imagination

Explorations of gesture and inner movement

Edited by Helena De Preester

This volume brings together contributions by philosophers, art historians and artists who discuss, interpret and analyse the moving and gesturing body in the arts. Broadly inspired by phenomenology, and taking into account insights from cognitive science, the contribution of the motor body in watching a film,... full description
May 2013. vi, 320 pp.
C&EB 6
Cover not available

Moving Ourselves, Moving Others

Motion and emotion in intersubjectivity, consciousness and language

Edited by Ad Foolen, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Timothy P. Racine and Jordan Zlatev

The close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role... full description
April 2012. viii, 492 pp.
DAPSAC 90
Cover not available

Multimodal Performance and Interaction in Focus Groups

Kristin Enola Gilbert and Gregory Matoesian

Focus group interviews have seen explosive growth in recent years. They provide evaluations of social science, educational, and marketing projects by soliciting opinions from a number of participants on a given topic. However, there is more to the focus group than soliciting mere opinions. Moving beyond a narrow... full description
January 2021. xi, 190 pp.
BCT 78
Cover not available

Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics

Edited by María Jesús Pinar Sanz

The aim of this volume is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The innovative nature of the volume in relation to those existing in the field lies in the fact that it brings together contributions from three of the main approaches... full description
October 2015. x, 212 pp.
P&bns 196
Cover not available

New Adventures in Language and Interaction

Edited by Jürgen Streeck

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and... full description
August 2010. vi, 275 pp.
CELCR 19
Cover not available

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 relatively concrete—should be... full description
February 2019. vii, 382 pp.
AiCR 82
Cover not available

The Primacy of Movement

Expanded second edition

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point,... full description
July 2011. xxxii, 574 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.
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 20
Cover not available

Sensory Linguistics

Language, perception and metaphor

Bodo Winter

One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to... full description
April 2019. xiv, 289 pp.
CELCR 12
Cover not available

The Shared Mind

Perspectives on intersubjectivity

Edited by Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen

The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed “social cognition” through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of... full description
June 2008. xiii, 391 pp.
Z 226
Cover not available

Sign Language in Papua New Guinea

A primary sign language from the Upper Lagaip Valley, Enga Province

Adam Kendon †

This book presents in revised form and as a single monograph three papers on a sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea. Originally published in 1980, for more than twenty years these papers remained the only report of a sign language from that part of the world. The detailed descriptive analyses that... full description
February 2020. xvii, 201 pp.
AIS 9
Cover not available

Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure

Viviana Masia

The book tackles the sociobiological bases of Information Structure (IS) inquiring both its evidential and neurobiological underpinnings in human communication. Its purpose is to delve into the epistemic and neurocognitive rationales behind the realization of informational hierarchies in a sentence. The book zooms in... full description
November 2017. xxi, 193 pp.
AiCR 93
Cover not available

Visually Situated Language Comprehension

Edited by Pia Knoeferle, Pirita Pyykkönen-Klauck and Matthew W. Crocker

Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language... full description
March 2016. x, 358 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.
BCT 70
Cover not available

Where do nouns come from?

Edited by John B. Haviland

The noun is an apparent cross-linguistic universal; nouns are central targets of language acquisition; they are frequently prototypical exemplars of Saussurian arbitrariness. This volume considers nouns in sign languages and in the evanescent performances of homesigners (and gesturers), which exhibit considerable... full description
June 2015. v, 140 pp.
GS 7
Cover not available

Why Gesture?

How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating

Edited by R. Breckinridge Church, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly

Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak, they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker, often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first to systematically... full description
April 2017. vii, 433 pp.