Eve Sweetser

Barbara Dancygier

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-building processes underlying conditional thinking and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality. Using a broad range of attested English conditional constructions, the book examines inter-constructional relationships. Within the framework of Mental Spaces Theory, shared parameters of meaning are shown to be relevant to conditional constructions generally, as well as related temporal and causal constructions. This significant contribution to the field will be welcomed by a wide range of researchers in theoretical and cognitive linguistics.

Conditional Constructions

Mental Spaces in Grammar

José Sanders

Lieven Vandelanotte

"The selection of papers presented here was originally published in 2010 as a special issue (3.2) of the journal English Text Construction."

A View from Cognitive Linguistics

Textual Choices in Discourse

This volume provides a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint in cognition and communication.

A Multimodal Perspective

Viewpoint in Language

How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov.

A Cognitive Approach

The Language of Stories

This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. Comprehensive and practical, the book includes analyses of figurative uses of both word meanings and linguistic constructions. • Provides definitions of major concepts • Offers in-depth analyses of examples, exploring multiple levels of complexity • Surveys figurative structures in different discourse genres • Helps students to connect figurative usage with the conceptual underpinnings of language • Goes beyond English to explore cross-linguistic and cross-modal data

Figurative Language

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Wei-lun Lu

Arie Verhagen

This volume explores the cross-linguistic diversity, and possibly inconsistency, of the span of linguistic means that signal reported speech and thought. The integration of broad linguistic (viewpoint in conversation and narrative) and cognitive (theory of mind and understanding the inner life and thought of others) strategies for handling mixed points of view will be considered.

Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools across Languages and Modalities

Viewpoint and the Fabric of Meaning

Michael Borkent

Mike Borkent

Jennifer Hinnell

This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.

Barbara Dancygier

Books

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