Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind


Book Description

In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The intertwining of the evolutionary and individual time scales of human development is a key theme unifying the lectures, as is the fundamentally cultural nature of language and cognition. Familiar topics in cognitive linguistics, such as spatial semantics and conceptual blending, are addressed from these cultural, comparative and developmental perspectives. Chris Sinha also discusses the psychological roots of key concepts in cognitive linguistics, and sets out a biocultural approach to language evolution.




Ten Lectures on the Elaboration of Cognitive Grammar


Book Description

This book reviews the basic claims and descriptive constructs of Cognitive Grammar, outlines major themes in its ongoing development, and applies these notions to central problems in grammatical analysis. The initial review covers conceptual semantics, the conceptual characterization of grammatical categories, grammatical constructions, and the architecture of a unified theory of language structure. Main themes in the framework’s development include the dynamicity of language structure, grammar as the implementation of semantic functions, systems of opposing elements to serve those functions, and organization in strata representing successive elaborations of a baseline structure. The descriptive application of these notions centers on nominal and clausal structure, with special emphasis on nominal grounding.




Ten Lectures on Cognitive Modeling


Book Description

These lectures discuss cognitive modelling in language-based meaning construction. It puts forward a unified analytical framework for several linguistic phenomena, including different types of constructions, traditional implicature and speech acts, and figures of speech like metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and irony.




The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies. The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas: • Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar; • Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others; • Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography; • New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies. The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.




The Third Space and Chinese Language Pedagogy


Book Description

The Third Space and Chinese Language Pedagogy presents the Third Space as a new frame through which foreign language pedagogy is conceptualized as a pedagogy of negotiating intentions and expectations in another culture. The field of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the past decades has been expanding rapidly at the beginning and intermediate levels, yet it is lacking in scholarship on the true advanced level both in theory building and research-supported curriculum and material development. This book argues that it is time for CFL to go beyond merely satisfying the desire of gazing at the other, whether it is curiosity about the other or superiority over the other, to focusing on learning to work with the other. It reimagines the field as co-constructing a transcultural Third Space where learners are becoming experts in negotiating intentions and expectations in another culture. It presents a range of research-based CFL pedagogical scholarship and practices especially relevant to the advanced level and to the goal of enabling learners to go past fans or critics to become actors/players in the game of cross-lingual and intercultural cooperation.




Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics and the Unification of Spoken and Signed Languages


Book Description

In Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics and the Unification of Spoken and Signed Languages Sherman Wilcox suggests that rather than abstracting away from the material substance of language, linguists can discover the deep connections between signed and spoken languages by taking an embodied view. This embodied solution reveals the patterns and principles that unite languages across modalities. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Wilcox explores such issues as the how to apply cognitive grammar to the study of signed languages, the pervasive conceptual iconicity present throughout the lexicon and grammar of signed languages, the relation of language and gesture, the grammaticization of signs, the significance of motion for understanding language as a dynamic system, and the integration of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive linguistics.




Ten Lectures on Quantitative Approaches in Cognitive Linguistics


Book Description

This series of lectures provides an overview of the author's work on quantitative applications in cognitive linguistics by discussing a wide range of studies involving corpus-linguistic as well as experimental work. After a discussion of how corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics relate to each other, the author discusses empirical and statistical studies of a wide variety of phenomena including morphophonology (morphological blends and alliteration effects), corpus-based cognitive semantics, frequency and association at the syntax-lexis interface. The book concludes with chapters exemplifying the role that bottom-up approaches can take, the role of statistical methods more generally, and the role of converging evidence from corpus and experimental data.The lectures for this book were given at The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics in May 2013. In the e-book version all handouts have been made available at the back. All audio of the lectures as well as the handouts are available for free, in Open Access, here.




Ten Lectures on the Basics of Cognitive Grammar


Book Description

These lectures provide a basic introduction to the linguistic theory known as Cognitive Grammar. It is argued that a conceptualist semantics, well motivated in its own terms, provides the basis for a symbolic view of grammar. Consisting in the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content, grammar is inherently meaningful, and basic grammatical notions have conceptual characterizations. An account is given of grammatical categories, markings, and constructions. A number of central topics are examined in detail, including subjects, possessives, locatives, voice, and impersonals.




Language as an Ecological Phenomenon


Book Description

Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book presents a process view in which language is substituted by languaging, emphasising the bioecologies that we cohabit with numerous other species. It puts forward this perspective by looking at the theoretical considerations behind the understanding of languaging as bioecological, and through examining languaging in various contexts and places. Drawing on examples from across the world, it addresses topics such as climate catastrophes, corporate narratives, questions of ecological leadership, the bioecological implications of the COVID pandemic, and relational landscapes. It also makes use of data from across multiple bioecological settings, including the dairy and agricultural industries.




Negotiating Linguistic Plurality


Book Description

Cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality are seen as markers of our time, linked to discourses about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the context of economic globalization in the late twentieth century. It is often monolingualism, however, that informs understanding and policies regulating the relationship between languages, nations, and communities. Grounded by the idea of language as lived experience, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes linguistic plurality to be a continuing human condition and offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective on it. The essays featured cover concepts and praxis in which linguistic plurality surfaces in the public sphere through institutional and individual practices. The collection adopts a critical view of language policies and foregrounds distances and dissonances between policy and language practices by presenting lived experiences of multilingualism. Translation, seen as constitutive to the relations inherent to linguistic plurality, is at the core of the volume. Contributors explore a range of social and institutional aspects of the relationship between translation and linguistic plurality, foregrounding less documented experiences and minoritized practices. Presenting knowledge that spans regions, languages, and territories, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality is a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes language plurality: what its limits are, as well as its possibilities.