A dish may be delicious, a painting beautiful, a piece of information justified. Whether the attributed properties "really" hold, seems to depend on somebody like a speaker or a group of people that share standards and background. Relativists and contextualists differ in where they locate the dependency theoretically. This book collects papers that corroborate the contextualist view that the dependency is part of the language.

This volume presents new developments in cognitive grammar and explores its descriptive and explanatory potential with respect to a wide range of language phenomena. These include the formation and use of locationals, causative constructions, adjectival and nominal expressions of oriented space, morphological layering, tense and aspect, and extended uses of verbal predicates. There is also a section on the affinities between cognitive grammar an early linguistic theories, both ancient and modern.

Rhetoric and stylistics deal with successful human communication and the arrangement of language in texts. As the most influential of all language-related disciplines, rhetoric has an ancient tradition and is presently experiencing a remarkable revival. Stylistics analyzes the structures of texts with regard to their semantic potential and their function in the life of the individual and in society. The handbook offers surveys of theoretical approaches, forms of linguistic practice and practical contexts from antiquity to the present.

The Theme-Topic Interface (TTI) gives a useful catalogue of approaches to the concept Theme in the analysis of Natural Language. The book is written with both theoretical and descriptive goals and aims to synthesize and revise current approaches to pragmatic functions. In addition, TTI explains that different thematic constructions in natural language reveal different discourse strategies related to point of view and speaker subjectivity, which shows the mutually supportive role of form and discourse function vis-á-vis each other.

The Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (HECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the HECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important.