The Construal of Space in Language and Thought


Book Description

Recoge: Espacio en el lenguaje; Espacio como elemento cultural; Espacio como puente a otros dominios conceptuales; Espacio como un principio de organización del pensamiento.




The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics


Book Description

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.




Space in Language and Cognition


Book Description

Languages differ in how they describe space, and such differences between languages can be used to explore the relation between language and thought. This 2003 book shows that even in a core cognitive domain like spatial thinking, language influences how people think, memorize and reason about spatial relations and directions. After outlining a typology of spatial coordinate systems in language and cognition, it is shown that not all languages use all types, and that non-linguistic cognition mirrors the systems available in the local language. The book reports on collaborative, interdisciplinary research, involving anthropologists, linguists and psychologists, conducted in many languages and cultures around the world, which establishes this robust correlation. The overall results suggest that thinking in the cognitive sciences underestimates the transformative power of language on thinking. The book will be of interest to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers, and especially to students of spatial cognition.




The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. The first twenty chapters give readers the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of the fundamental analytic concepts and descriptive models of Cognitive Linguistics and their background. The book starts with a set of chapters discussing different conceptual phenomena that are recognized as key concepts in Cognitive Linguistics: prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, perspectivization, mental spaces, etc. A second set of chapters deals with Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, and Word Grammar, which, each in their own way, bring together the basic concepts into a particular theory of grammar and a specific model for the description of grammatical phenomena. Special attention is given to the interrelation between Cognitive and Construction Grammar. A third set of chapters compares Cognitive Linguistics with other forms of linguistic research (functional linguistics, autonomous linguistics, and the history of linguistics), thus giving a readers a better grip on the position of Cognitive Linguistics within the landscape of linguistics at large. The remaining chapters apply these basic notions to various more specific linguistic domains, illustrating how Cognitive Linguistics deals with the traditional linguistic subdomains (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, text and discourse), and demonstrating how it handles linguistic variation and change. Finally they consider its importance in the domain of Applied Linguistics, and look at interdisciplinary links with research fields such as philosophy and psychology. With a well-known cast of contributors from around the world, this reference work will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in (cognitive) linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology.




Spatial Dimensions of Social Thought


Book Description

Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.




Neuropsycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Cognition


Book Description

This book brings together experts from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience to explore how a multidisciplinary approach can impact on research into the neurocognition of language. International contributors present cutting-edge research from cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics and computer science, and discuss how this contributes to neuropsycholinguistics, a term coined by Jean-Luc Nespoulous, to whom this book is dedicated. Chapters illustrate how researchers with different methods and theoretical backgrounds can contribute to a unified vision of the study of language cognition. Reinterpreting neuropsycholinguistics through the lens of each research field, the book demonstrates important attempts to adopt a comprehensive view of speech and language pathology. Divided into three sections the book covers: linguistic mechanisms and the architecture of language the relationship between language and other cognitive processes the assessment of speech and language disabilities and compensatory mechanisms. Neuropsycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Cognition presents a unique contribution to cognitive science and language science, from linguistics to neuroscience. It will interest academics and scholars in the field, as well as medical researchers, psychologists, and speech and language therapists.




The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition


Book Description

Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings...). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.




Distance in Language


Book Description

The conceptual metaphor of ""distance"" plays a crucial role in current perceptions of the world and humans' various interactions within it. It hardly seems possible to conceptualize space and time, emotional involvement in events, and relationships with other people in terms other than ""distance"". As a consequence, this primarily spatial concept figures prominently in the verbal expression of these abstract notions, and is thus highly relevant for the analysis of linguistic phenomena. In recen ...




Pathologies of Body, Self and Space


Book Description

In this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Spence and Halligan explore syndromes which arise with the dissociation of body and self, with contributions drawn from an internationally renowned panel of authors.