This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e. minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

Metaphor researchers, including myself (see chapter 3), working within the framework of cognitive linguistics use a number of different terms to refer to the conceptual structures that they assume to constitute conceptual metaphors. The most commonly employed term is that of domain (as in source and target domain), but several others are also in circulation, including image schemas (e.g., Lakoff, 1990, 1993), frames (e.g,, Lakoff, 1996; Kövecses, 2006)), scenes (e.g., Grady, 1997a, b), mental spaces (e.g., Fauconnier and Turner (2002), schemas (e.g., Lakoff and Turner, 1989), and scenarios (e.g., Musolff, 2006, 2016). There are more terms in use (such as model), but the list is sufficient to indicate some terminological confusion among the practitioners of conceptual metaphor theory. But more importantly, the terminological chaos is a reflection of a serious, deep-seated theoretical-conceptual dilemma; namely, the difficulty of identifying the appropriate conceptual unit, or structure, that participates in the formation of conceptual metaphors. The present chapter is an attempt to offer a way of handling this issue .