In this ambitious and wide-ranging text, Andrew Goatly explores the language of metaphor. Combining insights from relevance theory and functional linguistics, he provides a powerful model for understanding how metaphors work in real communicative situations, how we use them to communicate meaning as well as how we process them. Examining the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, Goatly surveys the means by which metaphors are realized in texts and locates the interpretation of metaphor in its social context.

The language of law reflects the overlapping, competing and co-existing nature of legal discourse; its form both the product of its linguistic history and a response to the fluidity of legal culture. This book examines legal language as a language for special purposes, evaluating the functions and characteristics of legal language and the terminology of law.

In this highly original reanalysis of minimalist syntax, Thomas Stroik considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as his starting point Chomsky's minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, Stroik investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, he argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties.

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came to have a meaning in the minds of animals and how in humans this meaning eventually came to be expressed as language. He reviews a mass of evidence to show how close some animals, especially primates and more especially apes, are to the brink of human language. Apes may not talk to us but they construct rich cognitive representations of the world around them, and here, he shows, are the evolutionary seeds of abstract thought - the means of referring to objects, the memory of events, even elements of the propositional thinking philosophers have hitherto reserved for humans.

A new picture of the relationship between literacy, social status, and political power in the medieval period.

Through the analysis of magic as a metaphor for the mysterious workings of writing, Glamorous Sorcery sheds light on the power attributed to language in shaping perceptions of the world and conferring status.