This book offers a critical perspective on cognitive approaches to metaphor, metonymy, and the philosophical background underpinning experientialist semantics. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and congenial cognitivists. Verena Haser suggests that we abandon some familiar methodological principles connected with experientialist research. Instead, she proposes a new perspective on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy and provides an account of metaphorical transfer that does not rely on the notion of conceptual metaphor.

This study presents a comprehensive syntactic and semantic analysis of a geographically balanced corpus of written and spoken texts, in contemporary Scots (including the author's own field recordings), amply illustrated with examples, thus making a major contribution to the field of English dialect grammar.

This book is an attempt to bring together traditional philological records and knowledge of the ways and means of schwa loss and reexamine them in relation to the entire language system.

What determines whether we say She gave him a book instead of She gave a book to him? The author views this 'dative alternation' as a sociolinguistic variable and explores its distribution across different British English dialects, registers and time frames. It thereby offers a novel, language-external explanation of the choice of one construction over the other and sheds new light on British dialect syntax.

Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König (eds.), Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective. Structure and meaning of adverbial verb forms – adverbial participles, gerunds (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology; 13)