This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys...

This book, intended primarily for researchers and advanced students, expands greatly on previous work by the authors exploring the topography of the multidimensional functional-cognitive space within which functional, cognitive and/or constructionist approaches to language can be located. The analysis covers a broad range of 16 such approaches, with some additional references to Chomskyan minimalism, and is based on 58 questionnaire items, each rated by 29 experts on particular models for their importance in the model concerned. These ratings are analysed statistically to reveal overall...