In this book, Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer present thirty-five original essays bringing together work at the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and related fields. These contributions apply a range of methodologies and perspectives to the problem of the relation of language to human culture and cognition, with an emphasis on how language is produced and understood in context. Topics considered include human categorization, cognitive and cultural models, embodiment, and the experiential basis of categories and conceptual structures, lexical and constructional semantics, and the distribution and formal properties of linguistic elements and constructions in a wide variety of languages.Some perspectives and methodologies represented among the papers are corpus-based methodologies, discourse analysis, language acquisition, contrastive analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, and language change and grammaticalization. Some theoretical frameworks deployed in the various analyses are Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, Metaphor theory, andMental Space and Blending Theory.