Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research
Over the past decades, linguists have taken a broader view of language and are borrowing methods and findings from other disciplines such as cognition and computer sciences, neurology, biology, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. This development has enriched our knowledge of language and communication, but at the same time it has made it difficult for researchers in a particular field of language studies to be aware of how their findings might relate to those in other (sub-)disciplines.
CELCR seeks to address this problem by taking a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of language and communication. The books in the series focus on a specific linguistic topic and offer studies pertaining to this topic from different disciplinary angles, thus taking converging evidence in language and communication research as its basic methodology.
21 - 25 of 25 results
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The Language of Pain
More LessHow is the universal, yet private and subjective, experience of pain talked about by different people in everyday encounters? What does the analysis of pain-related lexico-phraseological choices, grammatical structures, and linguistic metaphors reveal as to how pain is perceived and experienced? Are pain utterances primarily used to express or to describe this experiential domain? This is the first book that investigates such questions from both a functional and a cognitive perspective: it combines two converging usage-based theoretical models in a systematic linguistic inquiry of the construal of pain in everyday language. This work is based on a specialised electronic corpus of Greek naturally-occurring dialogues in a health care context, the underlying assumption being that in the absence of factual evidence intuition about language cannot reliably detect or predict patterns of usage. Comparing Greek with English data, this book significantly contributes to the development of this research field cross-linguistically.
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The Shared Mind
More LessThe cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed “social cognition” through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional “theory of mind” approach, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective, conative, intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared, intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication, imitation, gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and evolution, and language and linguistic theory.
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Thematics
More LessThemes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in language use.
Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.
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Visual Metaphor
More LessMetaphor has recently been reconceptualised as a fundamental part of the human conceptual system. It can hence be expressed in language but also in other modalities and media of communication, including gesture and body language, sound and music, and film and visuals. In spite of this theoretical landslide, however, the wide range of nonverbal metaphor and its processing has neither been empirically investigated on the same scale nor with the same rigour as metaphor in language. The overarching goal of this book is to report on the findings of a research program aimed at exploiting the vast cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic expertise on metaphor in language for a new, behaviourally founded approach to the structure and processes of metaphor in one of these nonverbal manifestations, namely static visuals. The book presents concepts and methods for the identification and analysis of metaphor in document structure as well as new approaches to the study of visual metaphor processing. Its results are intended to further the development of an encompassing and robust cognitive-scientific theory of metaphor by including visual metaphor while also enriching our understanding of the communicative possibilities and effects of visual metaphor in multimodal discourse.
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Where Words Get their Meaning
More LessWords are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning?
This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts.
By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.
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