This book analyzes events and narratives from the points of view of literature, grammar, discourse, and semantics. The contributors place the event and narrative categories at the center of interest and their specific goals are pursued by applying different, both qualitative and quantitative, research methods.
The unique strength of the current work is the author's attempt to create his own framework for investigating construal, (…) drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives that have never before been brought together for this purpose. Thus, the empirical part of the monograph is deeply situated within the field of Second Language Acquisition, with its focus on the processing of language by L2 learners. (…) Since construal as such, the pivotal concept of the monograph, is a notion developed within Cognitive Linguistics, the major theoretical orientation of the book is quite obviously on theories developed within this field, (…). However, the author is not satisfied with such a narrow focus and expands his framework by connecting the concept of construal to the theoretical perspectives developed in other disciplines, such as philosophy, psycholinguistics, or cognitive psychology. An important and innovative approach to the notion of construal proposed in the volume is viewing attention, with its related concept of cognitive salience, as the most superordinate process in construal. This novel approach opens up exciting opportunities for future research projects, which will certainly be stimulated by the many excellent ideas and the sound and logical theoretical framework present in the current work. Reviewer Prof Anna Cieślicka
This book is a collection of articles covering the theme of interaction. Interaction combines two crucial elements: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal. Accordingly, the authors approach this issue from two complementary perspectives: from the internal and external or cognitive and social perspective. The papers that take the former perspective focus on cognitive bases of interaction, on the representation of motion, on metaphor and metonymy, or gestures, perception and cognition. The topic that dominates the papers that take the social stance towards the topic of interaction is identity. By applying a variety of new analytical tools and concepts, the authors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society and institutions mould us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of these categories.