This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

This book investigates formal characteristics and discourse functions of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in spoken ELF as represented in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Building on the findings of previous ELF research, the book proposes that creativity might serve as a fundamental concept in accounting for the variation that seems to be central to describing and understanding English as a lingua franca.

This study is devoted to the analysis of Italian idioms with either ordinary or support verbs (also called light verbs). The research focuses on the exhaustive description of idioms, and is based on their systematic classification according to the principles of the Lexicon-Grammar methodology developed by Maurice Gross (1975, 1979 and further). A thorough examination of the literature shows strong disagreement on the acceptability of some idiomatic constructions. For this reason, the Web was used as a corpus to verify judgments on the supposed ungrammatical constructions. This approach showed that idiomatic constructions which have always been considered ungrammatical are instead perfectly acceptable if contextualized. The results obtained include the following: passive is not a "special case" when it concerns idioms, and idiomatic constructions show the same complexity as non-idiomatic constructions.

The comprehension, retention and production of idiomatic expressions is one of the most difficult areas of the lexicon for second language (L2) learners, even very advanced students, to master. This book investigates this under-researched and interesting aspect of language acquisition, shedding light on both conventional uses of idiomatic expressions as well as creative variant forms. The chapters in the book delve into different aspects of idiomatic mastery: students’ comprehension of canonically used idioms in both their first and second language; the effects of multimedia and visualization techniques on learners’ comprehension and retention of L2 idioms; students’ misinterpretations of L2 idioms; L2 learners’ comprehension of creative idiom variants and their use of idioms in free composition writing.

Intercultural pragmatics addresses one of the major issues of human communication in the globalized world: how do people interact with each other in a language other than their native tongue, and with native speakers of the language of interaction? Bringing together a globally-representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides an authoritative overview to this fascinating field of study, as well as a theoretical framework. Chapters are grouped into 5 thematic areas: theoretical foundation, key issues in Intercultural Pragmatics research, the interface between Intercultural Pragmatics and related disciplines, Intercultural Pragmatics in different types of communication, and language learning. It addresses key concepts and research issues in Intercultural Pragmatics, and will trigger fresh lines of enquiry and generate new research questions. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading not only for scholars of pragmatics, but also of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and second language teaching and learning.

This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.

Il volume raccoglie una serie di quattordici saggi da parte di studiosi italiani e stranieri – colleghe e colleghi, allieve di un tempo, amici – che hanno inteso così onorare la figura personale e professionale di Stefania Nuccorini, Professore Onorario dell’Università di Roma Tre, e autorevole studiosa di lingua e linguistica inglese. I saggi esplorano ambiti di ricerca in cui si è distinta l’operosità scientifica di Stefania Nuccorini, definita “Master of Words” dalle colleghe e amiche di Roma Tre. In primis, passato, presente e futuro della lessicografia, con saggi sui glossari anglosassoni (Faraci), note d’uso nella storia della lessicografia inglese (Bejoint), learners’ dictionaries (Klotz) e e-lexicography (Pettini). Poi, studi di carattere lessicologico, con particolare riferimento alle collocazioni (Pinnavaia), agli anglicismi in italiano (Pulcini e Fiasco), ai verba dicendi in prospettiva comparativa e traduttiva inglese-italiano (Bruti), nonché all’uso di già nella traduzione audiovisiva dall’inglese (Pavesi e Zanotti). Di taglio didattico e transculturale sono due saggi su English as a Lingua Franca (Lopriore, Sperti) e un terzo sull’inglese come relay language (Nied Curcio). Completano la raccolta due saggi di carattere letterario e teatrale, relativi a Laurence Sterne (Ruggieri) e al Macbeth shakespeariano (Di Giovanni e Raffi), mentre si muove tra lingua e letteratura un saggio sulle pratiche stenografiche di Charles Dickens (Bowles). DOI: 10.13134/9rdp-3r87

This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features 'emerge' during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new ('ad hoc') concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson's Cognitive Principle of Relevance.

The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole, these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue, and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.