Casting light on the interplay between language and domain-specific knowledge, this new book brings together ideas and approaches from cognitive linguistics and psychology which aim at explaining how language works, and how people combine their knowledge from a variety of sources as they make sense of and draw inferences from text. The different domains treated come from law, medicine, economics, and the study of risk. In the book, these are approached mainly in the context of communication between experts and laymen, and of differences in and the effects of people's prior knowledge. The over-arching theme of the book is mental models; the twelve papers contained in it concentrate on the relation between cognitive aspects of language and text, and the nature and structure of our knowledge. The areas of language, text, and knowledge are in need of better cross-disciplinary integration, and the present book is ground-breaking in the sense that the editors and contributors succeed in bringing them together with-in the context of communication involving experts. Contents Preface o Lita Lundquist and Robert J. Jarvella, Introduction o Pierre-Yves Raccah, Lexical and Dynamic Topoi in Semantic Description: A Theoretical and Practical Differentiation between Words and Terms o Jan Engberg, Does Routine Formulation Change Meaning? - The Impact of Genre on Word Semantics in the Legal Domain o Henrik Hxeg M|ller, Noun Phrases in Specialized Communication. The Cognitive Processing of the Danish s-genitive Construction o Ese Almlund, Semantic Roles in Expert Texts -Exemplified by the Patient Role in Judgments o Lita Lundquist, Knowledge, Events, and Anaphors in Texts for Specific Purposes o Anne Lise Kjfr, On the Structure of Legal Knowledge: The Importance of Knowing Legal Rules for Understanding Legal Texts o Dorte Madsen, Communicative Situations as Reflected in Text Structure. On Legal Text Production and Background Knowledge o Annely Rothkegel, Transfer of Knowledge in Cross-cultural Discourse o Lene Palsbro, Argumentation and Knowledge - An Empirical Study on Inference-making in Expert and Novice Reasoning o Leo Noordman, Wietske Vonk, and Wim H. G. Simons, Knowledge Representation in the Domain of Economics o Robert J. Jarvella and Suzie Mathieu, On Judging uantities in Text without Expert Knowledge o Anthony J. Sanford and Linda M. Moxey, Risk Portrayal and Risk Appreciation as a Problem in Language Use o Appendix: A TV judgement o List of Contributors o Subject Index