Mental Spaces In Discourse And Interaction

The cognitive theory of mental spaces and conceptual integration (MSCI) is a twenty-year-old, cross-disciplinary enterprise that presently unfolds in academic circles on many levels of reflection and research. One important area of inquiry where MSCI can be of immediate use is in the pragmatics of written and spoken discourse and interaction. At the same time, empirical insights from the fields of interaction and discourse provide a necessary fundament for the development of the cognitive theories of discourse. This collection of seven chapters and three commentaries aims at evaluating and developing MSCI as a theory of meaning construction in discourse and interaction. MSCI will benefit greatly not only from empirical support but also from clearer refinement of its methodology and philosophical foundations. This volume presents the latest work on discourse and interaction from a mental spaces perspective, surely to be of interest to a broad range of researchers in discourse analysis.

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.

`For those already familiar with discursive work it will be a joy - Edwards writes with enormous clarity and insight. For psychologists whose work involves an understanding of the relations between language and cognition this book will be essential reading.... This is a demanding book that will repay close attention. It can also be dipped into as a resource for the brilliant reworkings of traditional psychological topic areas, such as emotion, language, cognition, categories, AI, narrative, scripts and developmental psychology. If you want a glimpse into the future of psychology, get this book - the end of cognitivism starts here' - History and Philosophy of Psychology The central project of this mult

Cognitive science is a field that began with the realization that researchers in varied disciplines-psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, formal semantics, neuroscience, and others-had taken on a common set of problems in representation and meaning, in reasoning and language. Nevertheless, cognitive science as a whole enjoys no common methodology or theoretical framework, and is in danger of becoming even more fragmented with time. There are two reasons for this. First, cognitive science is built on existing methodologies that have different historical origins. AB a result, the psychologist's truth is different from the linguist's truth. The artificial intelligence researcher's truth is different from the philosopher's truth. The neuroscientist's truth is different from the formal semanticist's truth. All too often there is little or no recognition of the relevance of work in other disciplines to one's own concerns. Second, cognitive scientists tend to develop theories around isolated problems. For instance, there are theories about how humans categorize concepts, about how humans analyze linguistic expressions syntactically, about how the English tense system works semantically, about how humans reason about space or reason about time, about how goal-directed problem solving occurs, about how the brain computes, and so on.

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.

This book examines the diverse forms of conversational humor with the help of examples drawn from casual interactions among Russian speakers. It argues that neither an exclusively discourse-analytic perspective on the phenomenon nor an exclusively cognitive one can adequately account for conversational joking. Instead, the work advocates reconciling these two perspectives in order to describe such humor as a form of cognitive and communicative creativity, by means of which interlocutors convey additional meanings and imply further interpretive frames. Accordingly, in order to analyze cognition in interaction, it introduces a discourse-semantic framework which complements mental spaces and blending theory with ideas from discourse analysis. On the one hand, this enables both the emergent and interactive character and the surface features of conversational joking to be addressed. On the other, it incorporates into the analysis those normally backgrounded cognitive processes responsible for the additional meanings emerging from, and communicated by jocular utterances.

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

Bringing together a body of related research which has recently developed in Critical Discourse Analysis, this book is the first to address the role of perspective in socio-political discourse. Specifically, the contributions to this volume seek to explore, from a cognitive standpoint, the way in which perspective functions in three dimensions – space, time, and evaluation – to enact ideology and persuasion. A range of discourse genres are analysed, including political discourse, media discourse, and songs used as political tools. Starting from the contention that discourse processing relies on the same mechanisms that support our understanding and experience of space, the book finds a recurrent theme in the way in which perspectival concepts like distance and focus, prompted by linguistic signs, feature in our discursively constructed knowledge of social and political realities. By highlighting the complex nature of perspective-taking in ideological discourse, the volume sets the agenda for further research in this area. The book will appeal to linguists, discourse analysts, media scholars, and political scientists, and all who are interested in the relationship between language and cognition in the socio-political domain. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

The present book is a collection of selected papers held at the 11th Susanne Hübner Seminar from the 26th of February to the 1st of March 2001 in Zaragoza, Spain. The papers included in this volume address several issues connected with the relationship between what seems to be 'external' and 'internal' in human language usage. By 'external' is meant here communication, and more concretely, interaction; by 'internal', processing and conceptualization, that is to say, cognition. These two sides coincide with the subject-matter of two of the most active paradigms of linguistic research nowadays: pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, and the two main sections of this volume reflect two possible entry points to this dichotomy. The first section, Interacting, clearly puts the emphasis on interaction itself, whereas the second section, The system behind, is concerned with metaphor, metonymy and categorization processes.