Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the compositionality of constructional meaning, describing both the mental-space building processes underlying conditional thinking, and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality. Using a broad range of attested English conditional constructions, the book examines inter-constructional relationships. Within the framework of Mental Spaces theory, shared parameters of meaning are shown to be relevant to conditional constructions generally, as well as to related temporal and causal constructions. This significant contribution to the field will be welcomed by a wide range of researchers in theoretical and cognitive linguistics.

All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express causal relations in discourse. Causal connectives and causative auxiliaries are among the salient markers of causal construals. Cognitive scientists and linguists are interested in how much of this causal modeling is specific to a given culture and language, and how much is characteristic of general human cognition. Speakers of English, for example, can choose between because and since or between therefore and so. How different are these from the choices made by Dutch speakers, who speak a closely related language, but (unlike English speakers) have a dedicated marker for non-volitional causality (daardoor)? The central question in this volume is: What parameters of categorization shape the use of causal connectives and auxiliary verbs across languages? The book discusses how differences between even quite closely related languages (English, Dutch, Polish) can help us to elaborate the typology of levels and categories of causation represented in language. In addition, the volume demonstrates convergence of linguistic, corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic methodologies in determining cognitive categories of causality. The basic notion of causality appears to be an ideal linguistic phenomenon to provide an overview of methods and, perhaps more importantly, invoke a discussion on the most adequate methodological approaches to study fundamental issues in language and cognition.

What makes us talk about viewpoint and perspective in linguistic analyses and in literary texts, as well as in landscape art? Is this shared vocabulary marking real connections between the disparate phenomena? This volume argues that human cognition is not only rooted in the human body, but also inherently 'viewpointed' as a result; consequently, so are language and communication. Dancygier and Sweetser bring together researchers who do not typically meet on common ground: analysts of narrative and literary style, linguists examining the uses of grammatical forms in signed and spoken languages, and analysts of gesture accompanying speech. Using models developed within cognitive linguistics, the book uncovers surprising functional similarities across various communicative forms, arguing for specific cognitive underpinnings of such correlations. What emerges is a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint and a groundbreaking methodology for investigating communicative choices across various modalities and discourse contexts.

This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. * Provides definitions of major concepts * Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity * Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres * Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language * Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data

This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. * Provides definitions of major concepts * Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity * Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres * Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language * Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-building processes underlying conditional thinking and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality. Using a broad range of attested English conditional constructions, the book examines inter-constructional relationships. Within the framework of Mental Spaces Theory, shared parameters of meaning are shown to be relevant to conditional constructions generally, as well as related temporal and causal constructions. This significant contribution to the field will be welcomed by a wide range of researchers in theoretical and cognitive linguistics.

This book offers a new approach to the analysis of the multiple meanings of English modals, conjunctions, conditionals, and perception verbs. Although such ambiguities cannot easily be accounted for by feature-analyses of word meaning, Eve Sweetser's argument shows that they can be analyzed both readily and systematically. Meaning relationships in general cannot be understood independently of human cognitive structure, including the metaphorical and cultural aspects of that structure. Sweetser shows that both lexical polysemy and pragmatic ambiguity are shaped by our metaphorical folk understanding of epistemic processes and of speech interaction. Similar regularities can be shown to structure the contrast among root, epistemic and speech act uses of modal verbs, multiple uses of conjunctions and conditionals, and certain processes of historical change observed in Indo-European languages. Since polysemy is typically the intermediate step in semantic change, the same regularities observable in polysemy can be extended to an analysis of semantic change.

What makes us talk about viewpoint and perspective in linguistic analyses and in literary texts, as well as in landscape art? Is this shared vocabulary marking real connections between the disparate phenomena? This volume argues that human cognition is not only rooted in the human body, but also inherently 'viewpointed' as a result; consequently, so are language and communication. Dancygier and Sweetser bring together researchers who do not typically meet on common ground: analysts of narrative and literary style, linguists examining the uses of grammatical forms in signed and spoken languages, and analysts of gesture accompanying speech. Using models developed within cognitive linguistics, the book uncovers surprising functional similarities across various communicative forms, arguing for specific cognitive underpinnings of such correlations. What emerges is a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint and a groundbreaking methodology for investigating communicative choices across various modalities and discourse contexts.