Over the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has grown to be one of the most broadly appealing and dynamic frameworks for the study of natural language. Essentially, this new school of linguistics focuses on the meaning side of language: linguistic form is analysed as an expression of meaning. And meaning itself is not something that exists in isolation, but it is integrated with the full spectrum of human experience: the fact that we are embodied beings just as much as the fact that we are cultural beings.

Writing about humour can be a strange and somewhat disorientating business. Humour is glued into social, cultural and even national contexts, so writing a monograph which hopefully draws an international readership forces one to tread a fine line when “unpacking” humour texts; a fine line that is between, on the one hand, stating the obvious in the explication of humorous material,or, on the other, risking losing readers because the topically and culturally situated references within those texts have not been made sufficiently transparent.

This study deals with the use of pragmatic markers in English and Catalan oral narrative (Labov and Waletzky 1967), a monologued text-genre that presents a regular structural pattern. The main aim is to try to show that pragmatic markers play a decisive role in the telling of the events. In order to be able to cope their signiЄcance within the text, the overall structure of English and Catalan narratives is also going to be analyzed and compared.

From the perspective of multilingual communication, a language serves not only as a means and a medium of communication, it is also a highly complex system which enters into a relationship with other languages and imprints its own dynamics upon those human beings involved in interaction by structuring their “action spaces”. Participants in multilingual interactions can be said to activate links between language and actions, mental activities, perception, thought patterns, knowledge systems etc. – in short, all mental and cognitive processes involved in communication – which are active both universally and in each individual language.

This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter , edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter.