Providing new insights into the field of cognitive analysis, this book exploring how cognitive processes are influenced by the cultural context in which individuals live and interact.
As cultures come into contact, they exchange ideas, traditions, and languages, leading to the emergence of hybrid cultural forms and linguistic innovations. This diversity enriches the global cultural landscape and contributes to the richness of language through borrowings, loanwords, and code-switching. Within this diverse linguistic landscape, cultural influences play a significant role in shaping semantics and cognition.
This volume brings together original case studies from a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts, including Bangla, Yanesha (Peruvian Amazonia), Traditional Bedouin Arabic, and Xicanx bilingual discourse, while also covering verbal language, gesture, prosody, touch, and digital communication. Chapters address emotionally, socially, and politically salient domains, such as love and compassion, childbirth and the body, migration and identity, education, and pandemic discourse, demonstrating how cognitive linguistic tools can illuminate lived experience in contemporary and historically grounded contexts.
As a whole, this collection shows how meaning emerges from the interaction of cognition, culture, and situated experience, offering readers a coherent framework that bridges semantics, discourse, and social practice. It provides valuable perspectives on how language reflects and interacts with cognitive and cultural factors, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of human communication and thought.

Carmen Bretones Callejas is Senior Lecturer in English Philology at the University of Almería, Spain.
Arie Verhagen is Professor Emeritus at Leiden University, the Netherlands.