The 'real-world' commitment of cognitive linguistics is demonstrated by increasingly extensive collaboration between researchers and industry partners. Yet, there has been little critical reflection on the lessons learnt from these collaborative efforts. Beginning researchers may benefit from in-depth discussion of how various practical realities inform, constrain, or otherwise shape important methodological and/or analytic decisions. This Element reflects on long-term collaborative work between a metaphor researcher and psychotherapists, offering practical advice on navigating the latent realities of this type of research. The three foundational components of psychotherapy – the therapist, the client, and the interactional setting itself – are discussed in turn, covering issues like ethically engaging therapists in research design and data analysis, dealing with underexplored variabilities in client responses, and managing the inherent tension between spontaneity and control in an interactional setting like psychotherapy. Some thoughts on how the lessons are transferable to other research contexts are offered.

This book represents a bold attempt to address contemporary issues in both metaphor and psychotherapy research. On one hand, metaphor research is increasingly concerned not just with describing metaphors in discourse, but how they could be used more adroitly in purposive ‘real world’ contexts such as psychotherapy. On the other hand, while a growing number of mental health professionals believe that metaphors contribute in some way to the psychotherapy process, their ability and willingness to use metaphors might be compromised by a relative unfamiliarity with the various nuanced aspects of metaphor theory. The present analysis of metaphors in authentic psychotherapeutic talk brings these theoretical aspects to the forefront, and suggests how they can be applied to enhance the use of communication of metaphors in psychotherapy. It should be of interest to metaphor researchers, mental health professionals, and discourse analysts in general.

By exploring the associations that people make between emotions and colours, looking at how they vary across languages, and exploring the explanations that people provide for the associations that they make, this Element provides insight into the ways in which humans express emotions through colour, and the reasons why they do so. Metaphoric (and metonymic) language and thought play a key role on several levels in the formation of emotion–colour associations, interacting with physical, environmental and social factors. A strong metaphorical connection between the valence of the emotion and the lightness of the colours with which it is associated, and between the intensity of an emotion and the saturation level of the colours with which it is associated is found. However, the strength of this association varies according to the linguistic background of the speaker, and the gender in which the emotion is presented.

The evolution of language has developed into a large research field. Two questions are particularly relevant for this strand of research: firstly, how did the human capacity for language emerge? And secondly, which processes of cultural evolution are involved both in the evolution of human language from non-linguistic communication and in the continued evolution of human languages? Much research on language evolution that addresses these two questions is highly compatible with the usage-based approach to language pursued in cognitive linguistics. Focusing on key topics such as comparing human language and animal communication, experimental approaches to language evolution, and evolutionary dynamics in language, this Element gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art of language evolution research and discusses how cognitive linguistics and research on the evolution of language can cross-fertilise each other. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Creative metaphor has been of central interest to the cognitive linguistic research community in recent years. However, little is known about what propels people to use metaphor in a creative way. In this Element, the authors identify and explore some of the clues that synaesthesia may provide to help us better understand the factors that drive creativity, with a particular focus on creative metaphor. They identify the factors that seem to trigger the production of creative metaphor in synaesthetes, and explore what this can tell us about creativity in the population more generally. Their findings provide insights into the nature of creativity as it relates to metaphor, emotion and embodied experience. They argue that the production of creative metaphor arises from strong affective reactions to sensory and emotional stimuli and that there is an embodied symbiotic relationship between sensory experiences, embodiment, emotion, hyperbole, empathy, metaphor and creativity.

This concise volume, using examples of psychotherapy talk, showcases the potential applications of data analytics for advancing discourse research and other related disciplines. The book provides a brief primer on data analytics, defined as the science of analyzing raw data to reveal new insights and support decision making. Currently underutilized in discourse research, Tay draws on the case of psychotherapy talk, in which clients’ concerns are worked through via verbal interaction with therapists, to demonstrate how data analytics can address both practical and theoretical concerns. Each chapter follows a consistent structure, offering a streamlined walkthrough of a key technique, an example case study, and annotated Python code. The volume shows how techniques such as simulations, classification, clustering, and time series analysis can address such issues as incomplete data transcripts, therapist–client (a)synchrony, and client prognosis, offering inspiration for research, training, and practitioner self-reflection in psychotherapy and other discourse contexts. This volume is a valuable resource for discourse and linguistics researchers, particularly for those interested in complementary approaches to qualitative methods, as well as active practitioners.

This volume serves as a comprehensive introduction to Time Series Analysis (TSA), used commonly in financial and engineering sciences, to demonstrate its potential to complement qualitative approaches in discourse analysis research. The book begins by discussing how time has previously been conceptualized in the literature, drawing on studies from variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The volume then segues into a discussion of how TSA is applied in other contexts in which observed values are expected to be dependent on earlier values, such as stock markets and sales figures, and introduces a range of discourse-specific contexts to show how the technique might be extended to analyze trends or shed further light on relevant themes in discourse over time. Each successive chapter features a different discourse context as a case study, from psychotherapy sessions, university lectures, and news articles, and looks at how studying different variables over time in each context – metaphors, involvement markers, and keywords, respectively – can contribute to a greater understanding of both present and future discourse activity in these settings. Taken together, this book highlights the value of TSA as a complementary approach to meaning-based analysis in discourse, making this ideal reading for graduate students and scholars in discourse analysis looking to employ quantitative methods in their research practice.

It has become increasingly clear that metaphor needs to be explored in terms of the social and discourse context in which it is used, especially where the aim is to address real-world problems. The notion of 'real world' metaphor research has been developed to describe this important area of investigation. This book starts by describing the nature and scope of real world metaphor research and then illustrates, through 17 detailed, mainly empirically-based studies, the different areas it can apply to, and different methodologies that can be employed. Research problems are explored in areas such as artificial intelligence, language teaching and learning, reconciliation dialogue, university lecture discourse, poetry and wine description. Methods include corpus analysis, experimentation, discourse analysis, cross-cultural analysis and genre analysis. In each case the empirical studies refer back to Gibbs's opening overview of real-world research. The result is an invaluable and cross-referenced collection of papers addressing real-world problems.

"Oxford Guide to Metaphors in CBT, Building Cognitive Bridges is a remarkable, memorable, and continually fascinating book, one that will be on my repeated reference list for years to come." Robert Leahy, Clinical Professor of Pscyhology in Psychiatry at Well-Comell University Medical College --

This book brings together leading metaphor researchers from a number of disciplines to unite the field of metaphor theory.