Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.

Jeanette Littlemore, University of Birmingham:
This book provides unprecedented coverage of a range of topics at the interface between discourse studies and cognitive linguistics. A wide range of research methods are covered in the various chapters, and there is some ground-breaking research in here. A must-read for researchers and students.