The collection of papers addresses the perennial problem of the relation between language and meaning. It proposes various theoretical approaches to the issue ranging from a synergetic theory of meaning merging the cognitive and the socio-historical perspectives, through holistic, evolutionary models and a revision of some of the assumptions of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to the discussion of the role of pragmatic competence in meaning construction. A number of papers make recourse to corpus based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The topics of specific linguistic investigations cover such diverse issues as idiom processing, emotion words in Chinese, valuation of abstract nouns, the preposition at and scalar adjectives. Several papers explore the application of the reflections on the nature of meaning to lexicography and translation. One, self-reflective article investigates the consequences of the unformulated assumptions about meaning for the coherence of proposed linguistic theories. The volume firmly places the study of meaning in the centre of the linguistic research by showing its significance for linguistic theory and its applications.

This collection of papers addresses new trends in Cognitive Linguistics. Three parts of the book focus on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Integration Network Analysis. Both the theoretical contributions and the empirical case studies stress the importance of contextual factors in the meaning making processes. They employ qualitative methods to analyze the use of metaphor in political discourse and in the conceptualization of emotions. The data sets include multimodal data, sign languages and co-speech gestures. The fourth part of the book contains two corpus-based studies. The fifth part concentrates on the grammatical categories of passive voice and aspect. One contribution discusses the problem of categorization in phonology.

The collection of papers addresses the perennial problem of the relation between language and meaning. It proposes various theoretical approaches to the issue ranging from a synergetic theory of meaning merging the cognitive and the socio-historical perspectives, through holistic, evolutionary models and a revision of some of the assumptions of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to the discussion of the role of pragmatic competence in meaning construction. A number of papers make recourse to corpus based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The topics of specific linguistic investigations cover such diverse issues as idiom processing, emotion words in Chinese, valuation of abstract nouns, the preposition at and scalar adjectives. Several papers explore the application of the reflections on the nature of meaning to lexicography and translation. One, self-reflective article investigates the consequences of the unformulated assumptions about meaning for the coherence of proposed linguistic theories. The volume firmly places the study of meaning in the centre of the linguistic research by showing its significance for linguistic theory and its applications.