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What is religion? How does it work? Many natural abilities of the human mind are involved, and crucial among them is the ability to use language. This volume brings together research from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, to understand the phenomena of religion as a distinctly human enterprise. The book is divided into three parts, each part preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, chapters introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology, and explore the brain's contrasting capacities, in particular its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the discussion of metaphor - the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. Specialists in particular religions apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive-linguistic research on religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years. What unfolds ultimately is the idea that the embodied cognition of humans is the basis not only of their languages, but also of their religions.

Within Construction Grammar, this volume moves away from a compartmentalized view of constructions with the aim of providing a more holistic description of grammar. Thus, the book brings together analyses that look at constructional families within the “constructicon” of such languages as English, Spanish, German, Polish, Croatian, and Hungarian. Part 1 focuses on how different analytical perspectives may be applied to comparable and/or connected constructions with a view to enhancing our understanding of their similarities, differences, and relations. Part 2 contributes to the state of the art in Construction Grammar in three ways: (i) by reconciling aspects of various constructionist analyses; (ii) by determining to what extent competing constructionist perspectives can offer more adequate approaches to specific analytical needs; and (iii) by challenging central assumptions within Construction Grammar. This book is expected to encourage further research into the anatomy of constructional families and their interrelations in all domains of constructional organization.

This collection of papers focuses on cognitive metaphor research (CMR) from the perspective of the current debate on linguistic data and evidence. The peculiarity of the book is that it reveals the causes that trigger the methodological problems of data handling in CMR. These problems include the identifiability of metaphors in discourse and the reliability of the methods of gathering metaphors such as linguistic intuition, discourse analysis, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experiments. In order to overcome their weaknesses and to enhance their reliance, the papers argue, on the one hand, for the combination of different methods of gathering and evaluating data in CMR. On the other hand, the papers also point out that converging evidence cannot be obtained without constraining the combinability of data stemming from different sources.