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Editorial 

This special issue brings together six original articles that view language through 
a cognitive lens. The cognitive lens here refers to a cognitive linguistics (henceforth 
CL) approach to language that originated in the United States in the late 1970s and has 
progressed since then into a full-blown research paradigm. It is centered around 
two commitments, the generalization commitment and the cognitive commitment, 
as well as several assumptions, such as a usage-based view of language and the central 
importance of meaning in linguistic enquiry. The CL movement, which has been enjoy-
ing much interest since its inception, continues to encompass new areas of study. This 
expansion of topics in CL is evident in this thematic volume.

The first article, by Izabela Kraśnicka, addresses the way gestures that accompany 
speech complement a gap in a statement, as shown in a corpus of six episodes of Kawa 
na ławę. The paper demonstrates that there are various types of gaps in statements, 
as well as various relations between a word and a gesture, in the corpus under scrutiny. 

The paper by Jarosław Wiliński offers a quantitative analysis of the preposition 
under in the under-NOUN pattern. Based on data taken from the Corpus of Contemporary 
American English, the paper shows that some nouns are more strongly attracted to the 
preposition in question than others. 

Adopting the concept of emotional potential, the paper by Magdalena Zyga examines 
four popular songs to demonstrate that the up/down schema is used in these songs 
to enhance or modify emotional potential at the verbal level. 

Departing from semantic field analysis, the paper by Izabela Sekścińska and Agnieszka 
Piórkowska is a qualitative corpus analysis that provides a definition of Brexit. Overall, 
Sekścińska and Piórkowska show that the lexeme Brexit is predominately used in a nega-
tive context and embedded in emotionally laden discourse. 

Grounded in the propositional theory of metonymy, the paper by Łukasz Matusz 
offers an analysis of the metonymic extensions of the verb see. Based on dictionary data, 
the paper shows that the English verb see is a source of various metonymic senses. 

The last article, by Katarzyna Lach Mirghani, which embraces the Conceptual 
Metaphor Theory, discusses the conceptualization of success in English and Polish. 
By investigating data taken from three corpora, the paper shows how success in concep-
tualized in the two languages.



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This is the second volume dedicated to studies in CL in Crossroads (the first 
was published in 2017). It is to be hoped that it will become a forum for researchers with 
an interest in this robust and vibrant research paradigm in the coming years. 

Daniel Karczewski