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When you use a metonymy to say “I’ve got a new set of wheels,” why do you refer to a car by means of the wheels rather any other part? Most cognitive linguist would agree that we prefer to talk about parts that are somehow salient, yet the seemingly simple notion of salience is entangled in a number of intricate problems related to how we understand and talk about the surrounding reality. Adopting the theoretic framework of Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, this volume studies deep and general cognitive factors governing salience effects that influence the ways we use conceptual metonymies in phonic and sign languages.
The book explores the conceptualization of the ‘heart’ as it is represented in 19 languages, ranging from broadly studied to endangered ones. Being one of the most extensively utilised body part name for figurative usages, it lends itself to rich polysemy and a wide array of metaphorical and metonymical meanings. The present book offers a rich selection of papers which observe the lexeme ‘heart’ from diverse perspectives, employing primarily the frameworks of cognitive and cultural linguistics as well as formal methodologies of lexicology and morphology. The findings are unique and novel contributions to the research of body-part semantics, embodied cognition and metaphor analysis, and in general, the investigation of the interconnectedness of language, culture, cognition and perception about the human body.
Animacy influences the grammar of languages in different ways, although it often goes unnoticed. Did you know that in English there is a strong tendency towards using the Saxon genitive ’s with humans instead of the preposition of? Have you ever hear that some Chinantecan languages encode the animate/inanimate distinction in almost every word, and that in Hatam only human nouns distinguish plural number? This book offers for the first time a comprehensive cross-linguistic study of its effects on morphological systems. How do real data fit the theorethical definition of animacy? Do we observe different types of animacy? Which techniques are employed to encode it? Which categories and features are affected, and how? Data from more than 300 languages provide answers to these (and other) questions.
The ‘face’ is the most identifiable feature of the human body, yet the way it is entrenched in language and cognition has not previously been explored cross-linguistically. This comparative volume continues the series on embodied cognition and conceptualization with a focus on the human ‘face’. Each contribution to this volume presents descriptions and analyses of how languages name the ‘face’ and utilize metonymy, metaphor, and polysemy to extend the ‘face’ to overlapping target domains. The contributions include primary and secondary data representing languages originating from around the world. The chapters represent multiple theoretical approaches to describing linguistic embodiment, including cultural, historical, descriptive, and cognitive frameworks. The findings from this diverse set of theoretical approaches and languages contribute to general research in cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, and onomastics.
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This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux’s materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings ‘always-already-there’ instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux’s consequential work in respect of Ferdinand de Saussure’s epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning.

Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, John Searle’s philosophy of language, B. F. Skinner’s indwelling agents, J. L. Austin’s speech situations, Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, and other influential linguistic researchers, are cited to explain imaginary semantic systems. The broader implications for structural metaphysics in language use are tacitly conveyed.
This essay presents Gould’s distinctive system for analyzing kin terminologies showing the system’s power, importance, and usefulness—and showing its relationship to other approaches and the payoffs each aims at. In revealing significant new empirical regularities and simplifications, Gould’s analytic system implies important constraints on future analytic and interpretative approaches to kin terminologies. Some of these new insights involve the demonstration of the effect of distributed collective cognitive systems over and above the effects of repeated iterations of individual cognitive constraints or pressures. It is the peculiar nature of the kinterm domain that allows these findings to be so directly shown, but the implication is that these findings apply more generally to the collective cognitive systems that make up language and culture.
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This volume describes how the significance of language and culture in forming human cognition has been understood from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. It discusses thinkers who realized that the human mind—and brain—is in fact a cultural artefact and that language is not merely a means to communicate thoughts, but also to form them in the first place. It presents a novel perspective on the history of philosophy in which the narrative is no longer centered on the question of whether knowledge results from experience or reason, but whether experience and reason are in fact possible without language.
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The volume explores the body part ‘eye’ as a source domain in conceptualization and a vehicle of embodied cognition. It includes in-depth case studies of languages situated in different cultural contexts in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. It also provides insights into cross-linguistic comparison of conceptualization patterns and semantic extension of the term ‘eye’ on various target domains. The contributions in the volume present a range of cultural models associated with the visual organ which take into account socio-cultural factors and language usage practices. The book offers new material and novel analyses within the subject of polysemy of body part terms. It also adds to studies on metaphor, metonymy and cultural conceptualizations within a cognitive linguistic paradigm.
Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet’s experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.
The representation of events is a central topic for cognitive science. In this series of lectures, Jeffrey M. Zacks situates event representations and their role in language within a theory of perception and memory. Event representations have a distinctive structure and format that result from computational and neural mechanisms operating during perception and language comprehension. A crucial aspect of the mechanisms is that event representations are updated to optimize their predictive utility. This updating has consequences for action control and for long-term memory. Event cognition changes across the adult lifespan and can be impaired by conditions including Alzheimer’s disease. These mechanisms have broad impact on everyday activity, and have shaped the development of media such as cinema and narrative fiction.