In line with the overall perspective of the Handbook series, the focus of Vol.9 is on language-related problems arising in the context of linguistic diversity and change, and the contributions Applied Linguistics can offer for solutions.

The 1987 landmark publications by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson made image schema one of the cornerstone concepts of the emerging experientialist paradigm of Cognitive Linguistics, a framework founded upon the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and stressing the fundamentally embodied nature of meaning, imagination and reason - hence language. Conceived of as the pre-linguistic, dynamic and highly schematic gestalts arising directly from motor movement, object manipulation, and perceptual interaction, image schemas served to anchor abstract reasoning and imagination to sensori-motor patterns in the conceptual theory of metaphor.

Based on the highly acclaimed and award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, this volume will provide an edited collection of almost 400 articles throughout which a representative subset of the world's major languages are unfolded and explained in up-to-date terminology and authoritative interpretation, by the leading scholars in linguistics.

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.

The volume collects three decades of articles by the distinguished linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles essentially argue for the importance of frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. Her work has been very influential for a broad range of researchers in linguistics, particularly in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, phonetics amnd historical linguistics.