Language, Expressivity and Cognition

The book aims to provide its readers with an updated, multi-perspective, cross-linguistic account of the centrality of expressivity in communication by exploring, on the one hand, the conceptual architecture of emotions as reflected in language and, on the other, the high emotional ‘temperature’ of a variety of contemporary discourses. The volume looks at expressivity through the essentially dual lens of language as it shapes communicative and cognitive processes but at the same time is also shaped by those processes. The contributions represent a number of disciplinary and methodological perspectives encompassing insights from (critical) discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics as well as sociolinguistics. The accounts offered in the volume are both intralingual as well as contrastive, employing qualitative and quantitative methods. The contributors cover a range of languages going well beyond English, and data types ranging from song lyrics to Twitter posts.