Mental Spaces in Grammar PDF Download

Author: Barbara Dancygier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113944610X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-building processes underlying conditional thinking and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality. Using a broad range of attested English conditional constructions, the book examines inter-constructional relationships. Within the framework of Mental Spaces Theory, shared parameters of meaning are shown to be relevant to conditional constructions generally, as well as related temporal and causal constructions. This significant contribution to the field will be welcomed by a wide range of researchers in theoretical and cognitive linguistics.

Author: Gilles Fauconnier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226239241
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language. The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists. The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.

Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199904
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Over the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has grown to be one of the most broadly appealing and dynamic frameworks for the study of natural language. Essentially, this new school of linguistics focuses on the meaning side of language: linguistic form is analysed as an expression of meaning. And meaning itself is not something that exists in isolation, but it is integrated with the full spectrum of human experience: the fact that we are embodied beings just as much as the fact that we are cultural beings. Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings brings together twelve foundational articles, each of which introduces one of the basic concepts of Cognitive Linguistics, like conceptual metaphor, image schemas, mental spaces, construction grammar, prototypicality and radial sets. The collection features the founding fathers of Cognitive Linguistics: George Lakoff, Ron Langacker, Len Talmy, Gilles Fauconnier, and Charles Fillmore, together with some of the most influential younger scholars. By its choice of seminal papers and leading authors, Basic Readings is specifically suited for an introductory course in Cognitive Linguistics. This is further supported by a general introduction to the theory and, specifically, the practice of Cognitive Linguistics and by trajectories for further reading that start out from the individual chapters.

Author: Barbara Dancygier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107782775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. • Provides definitions of major concepts • Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity • Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres • Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language • Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data

Author: Peter Auer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110312026
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
This book brings together three perspectives on language and space that are quite well-researched within themselves, but which so far are lacking productive interconnections. Specifically, the book aims to interconnect the following research areas: Language, space, and geography Grammar, space, and cognition Language and interactional spaces The contributions in this book cover geographical language variation within and across languages, language use in stationary and mobile interactional spaces, computer-mediated communication, and spatial reasoning across languages. This range of issues showcases the thematic and methodological breadth of research on language and space. In order to identify interconnections, the respective contributions are accompanied by commentaries that highlight common threads.

Author: Gilles Fauconnier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521449496
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Mental Spaces is the classic introduction to the study of mental spaces and conceptual projection, as revealed through the structure and use of language. It examines in detail the dynamic construction of connected domains as discourse unfolds. The discovery of mental space organization has modified our conception of language and thought: powerful and uniform accounts of superficially disparate phenomena have become available in the areas of reference, presupposition projection, counterfactual and analogical reasoning, metaphor and metonymy, and time and aspect in discourse. The present work lays the foundation for this research. It uncovers simple and general principles that lie behind the awesome complexity of everyday logic.

Author: Gilles Fauconnier
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360719
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as watches, gauges, compasses, airplane cockpit displays, with structure specifically designed to match conceptual inputs and integrate with them into stable blended frames of perception and action that can be memorized, learned by new generations, and thus culturally transmitted.

Author: Ronald W. Langacker
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110800527
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Grammar and Conceptualization documents some major developments in the theory of cognitive grammar during the last decade. By further articulating the framework and showing its application to numerous domains of linguistic structure, this book substantiates the claim that lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a gradation consisting of assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings).

Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199738637
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1366

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Book Description
With 49 chapters written by experts in the field, this reference volume authoritatively covers cognitive linguistics, from basic concepts and models to practical applications.

Author: Günter Radden
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292558
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive principles. The contributions collected in the volume focus on two types of cognitive principles guiding meaning construction: meaning construction by means of metonymy and metaphor, and meaning construction by means of mental spaces and conceptual blending. The papers in the former group survey experiential evidence of figurative meaning construction and discuss high-level metaphor and metonymy, the role of metonymy in discourse, the chaining of metonymies, metonymy as an alternative to coercion, and metaphtonymic meanings of proper names. The papers in the latter group address the issues of meaning construction prompted by personal pronouns, relative clauses, inferential constructions, “sort-of” expressions, questions, and the into-causative construction.