This book offers several insights into cross-cultural and multilingual learning, drawing upon recent research within two main areas: Language Studies and Multilingual Language Learning/Teaching. It places particular emphasis on the Polish learning environment and Poles abroad.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Vladimir Nabokov stood on the brink of losing everything all over again. The reputation he had built as the pre-eminent Russian novelist in exile was imperilled. In Nabokov and his Books, Duncan White shows how Nabokov went to America and not only reinvented himself as an American writer but also used the success of Lolita to rescue those Russian books that had been threatened by obscurity.

The edited volume Motifs in Language and Text is the first collection of original research in the area of the quantitative analysis of motifs. It hosts a collection of contributions that give insight to linguistic motifs theoretically across different languages, text genres, and structural levels, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic etc., and also to the tentative efforts upon the practical applications of the linguistic motifs.

To what extent can Cognitive Linguistics benefit from the systematic study of a creative phenomenon like humor? Although the authors in this volume approach this question from different perspectives, they share the profound belief that humorous data may provide a unique insight into the complex interplay of quantitative and qualitative aspects of meaning construction.

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted.