Gilles Fauconnier - Böcker

In the 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 12 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 research presented in this volume is intended for 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.

In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition - the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind. The Way We Think is a landmark synthesis that exemplifies this new direction. The theory of conceptual blending is already widely known in labouratories throughout the world this book is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that all learning and all thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. These blends are then themselves blended together into an increasingly rich structure that makes up our mental functioning in modern society. A child's entire development consists of learning and navigating these blends. The Way We Think shows how this blending operates how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, and concept of category and the rules by which we use blends to understand ideas that are new to us. The result is a bold, exciting, and accessible new view of how the mind works.

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.

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principles operate at the highest levels of scientific, artistic, and literary thought, and at the lower levels of elementary understanding and sentence meaning. Some key cognitive operations are analogical mappings, conceptual integration and blending, discourse management, induction and recursion. The analyses are based on a rich array of attested data in ordinary language, humor, action and design, science, and narratives. Phenomena that receive attention include counterfactuals; time, tense, and mood; opacity; metaphor; fictive motion; grammatical constructions; quantification over cognitive domains.

This title, first published in 1979, centres on control and binding in networks of anaphora. A wide variety of phenomena which are superficially global rather than local processes are examined, and the study deals directly with aspects of natural logic and finds its empirical motivation in concrete grammatical phenomena, thereby accounting for similarities and differences between natural languages and artificial formal logics. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This title, first published in 1979, centres on control and binding in networks of anaphora. A wide variety of phenomena which are superficially global rather than local processes are examined, and the study deals directly with aspects of natural logic and finds its empirical motivation in concrete grammatical phenomena, thereby accounting for similarities and differences between natural languages and artificial formal logics. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.