Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive/Functional Research consists of selected papers from the seventh meeting of the Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, held at the University of Alberta in October 2004. The papers fall into five main categories, reflecting the cognitive and functional orientation of the conference: reciprocity between lexis and syntax, semantic factors affecting form patterning, grammaticalization of basic verbs, form/meaning pairings in discourse, and experimental investigations of language/mind and language/use interactions. In addition, a plenary paper by Nick Evans on complex events, propositional overlay, and the special status of reciprocal clauses is included.

Philosopher, psychologist and linguist are all concerned with natural language. Accordingly, in seeking a unified view, Braine draws on insights from all these fields, sifting through the discordant schools of linguists. He concludes that one extended logic or “integrated semantic syntax” shapes grammar, but without constricting languages to being of one grammatical type.

Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research.

The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Language in Use examines language processing and first language learning and illuminates the insights that discourse and usage-based models provide in issues of second language learning. Using a diverse array of methodologies, it examines how speakers employ various discourse-level resources to structure interaction and create meaning. Finally, it addresses issues of language use and creation of social identity.

Unique in approach and wide-ranging in application, the contributions in this volume place emphasis on the analysis of actual discourse and the insights that analyses of such data bring to language learning as well as how language shapes and reflects social identity—making it an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in cutting-edge linguistics.

Offers an expansive, unified theory of thought that brings together the vast resources of neuroscience, computation, and cognitive linguistics.

What is an idea, and where does it come from? We experience thought as if it were abstract, but every thought is actually a physical thing, carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron; it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form complex ones. Thoughts, then, derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision, touch, and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex concepts, making meaning, creating metaphors, and framing our social and political ideas.

With The Neural Mind, George Lakoff, a pioneering cognitive linguist, and computer scientist Srini Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science, computational modeling, and linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry create the conceptual “frames” through which we understand our social lives? What kind of neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought, in which ideas are understood in terms of other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible, the book shows convincingly that the “metaphors we live by”—to use Lakoff’s famous phrase—aren’t abstractions but deeply embodied neural constructs.

The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind, bringing together the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified, accessible theory of thought. A field-defining work, Lakoff and Narayanan’s book will be of interest not just to linguists and cognitive scientists but also to psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, journalists, sociologists, and political scientists—and anyone who wants to understand how we really think.

What were ancient scribes doing when they copied a manuscript of a literary work? This question is especially problematic when we realize that ancient scribes preserved different versions of the same literary texts. In Scribal Memory and Word Selection: Text Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Raymond F. Person Jr. draws from studies of how words are selected in everyday conversation to illustrate that the same word-selection mechanisms were at work in scribal memory. Using examples from manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, Person provides new ways of understanding the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms at work during the composition/transmission of texts. Person reveals that, while our modern perspective may consider textual variants to be different literary texts, from the perspective of the ancient scribes and their audiences, these variants could still be understood as the same literary text.

Imagery, broadly defined as all that people may construe in cognitive models pertaining to vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and feeling states, precedes and shapes human language. In this pathfinding book, Gary B. Palmer restores imagery to a central place in studies of language and culture by bringing together the insights of cognitive linguistics and anthropology to form a new theory of cultural linguistics.

Palmer begins by showing how cognitive grammar complements the traditional anthropological approaches of Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking. He then applies his cultural theory to a wealth of case studies, including Bedouin lamentations, spatial organization in Coeur d'Alene place names and anatomical terms, Kuna narrative sequence, honorifics in Japanese sales language, the domain of ancestral spirits in Proto-Bantu noun-classifiers, Chinese counterfactuals, the non-arbitrariness of Spanish verb forms, and perspective schemas in English discourse.

This pioneering approach suggests innovative solutions to old problems in anthropology and new directions for research. It will be important reading for everyone interested in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.