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This volume brings together twelve usage-based studies conducted by leading researchers in language and cognition that explore core issues of figurativeness from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective.

This volume deals with core issues in figurative language and figurative thought. It also explores areas of convergence between idealised cognitive models and language across fourteen European and non-European languages (Croatian, English, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Old Saxon, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). The collection foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativeness in meaning construction, it emphasises the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and it also depicts the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives, such as language variation and cultural models, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse and the role of empirical work in cognitive linguistics.

The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that study English at the Police Academy.

Speech act theory accounts for an act that a speaker performs when pronouncing an utterance, which thus serves a function in communication. Since speech acts are the tools that allow us to interact in real-life situations, uttering a speech act requires knowledge not only of the language but also of its appropriate use within a given culture.

The term Semiotics (Semiologie) in the sense that it is understood in the twenty-first century was first used by Ferdinand de Saussure in his 1908 lessons on general linguistics. A sign is any entity representing another entity: smoke as a sign of fire, or a stop signal alerting drivers to come to a halt at a crossroad. To the whole set of signs in human and non-human communication belong different subsets depending on their quality. They can thus be encompassed as visual signs, auditory signs, verbal signs, cloth signs, and the like. As far as linguistics is concerned, semiotics is

Connotation, from the medieval Latin compound verbcon-noto, refers to an implied or accompanying feature, as the comitative prefixconsuggests. Denotation etymologically derives from the postclassical Latin compound verbde-notowhich conveys the idea of singling out an entity by way of distinctive features.