Conference selection

RAAM 2024

Macerata, 6-7 June, 2024

John Benjamins will be present at RAAM 2024. 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 29 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.
MiLCC 7
Cover not available

Attention to Metaphor

From neurons to representations

Valentina Cuccio

The last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a fundamental scientific discovery: the identification of mirror neurons and, consequently, the development of the Embodied Simulation theory. Neuroscientific data on the mechanism of Embodied Simulation and its role in conceptual and linguistic processing,... full description
September 2018. vi, 167 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.
CLSCC 15
Cover not available

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. In particular, the... full description
January 2024. v, 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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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.
CLiP 4
Cover not available

Introduction to Cognitive Pragmatics

Klaus-Uwe Panther

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... full description
March 2022. xxiii, 283 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 77
Cover not available

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 reference. The aim... full description
February 2024. viii, 223 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.
Z 228
Cover not available

Visual Linguistics with R

A practical introduction to quantitative Interactional Linguistics

Christoph Rühlemann

This book is a textbook on R, a programming language and environment for statistical analysis and visualization. Its primary aim is to introduce R as a research instrument in quantitative Interactional Linguistics. Focusing on visualization in R, the book presents original case studies on conversational... full description
July 2020. ix, 258 pp.
BCT 124
Cover not available

Visual Metaphors

Edited by Réka Benczes and Veronika Szelid

Whenever we think about the world – including its concrete and abstract entities – we typically see a series of so-called mental images in front of our eyes that aid us in everyday problem solving and navigating ourselves in the world. Visual metaphors, similarly to their linguistic counterparts, largely build on such... full description
September 2022. vi, 284 pp.