Frontmatter -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Lexical patterns -- A computational model of the ambiguity-vagueness spectrum -- Questions of life and death: Denotational boundary disputes -- Breakthroughs and disasters: The politics and ethics of metaphor use in the media -- Synonyme, lexical fields, and grammatical constructions. A study in usage-based cognitive semantics -- Collocation, anchoring, and the mental lexicon - an ontogenetic perspective -- Part II: Grammatical patterns -- The mean lean grammar machine meets the human mind: Empirical investigations of the mental status of linguistic rules -- Motivating grammatical and conceptual gender agreement in German -- Computed or entrenched? The French imparfait de politesse -- Valency constructions and clause constructions or how, if at all, valency grammarians might sneeze the foam off the cappuccino -- What exactly is the question-assertion distinction based on? An exploration in experimental speech act theory -- Backmatter