Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them.
Is language somehow innate in the structure of the human brain, or is it completely learned? This debate is still at the heart of linguistics, especially as it intersects with psychology and cognitive science.
Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context
Added by: dovesnake | Karma: 1384.51 | Fiction literature | 4 October 2008
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Focusing on the characterization of speech as a form of action, Exploring the Language of Drama introduces students to the stylistic analysis of drama. Here, some of the world's leading scholars demonstrate the importance of analyzing the text of drama rather than focusing on performance, presenting their approaches in an engaging and accessible style. The essays employ techniques from language analysis (specifically discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and pragmatic) to explore the language of plays, looking at how different theories and approaches can be used to help us understand characterization in dialogue, the cognitive patterns that support the narrative and discourse of drama, and the basic mechanisms of conversation in dramatic dialogue. Each chapter ends in a summary with follow-up exercises, and offers practical advice on how to analyze a play extract and write it up as an assignment.
“Whose Freedom?” is one of the most contested words in American political discourse. In Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea,
George Lakoff describes how the country is divided by two dramatically
different worldviews, cognitive frames that determine how we think
about economic policy, religion, science, foreign affairs—and freedom.
Methods in Cognitive Linguistics is an introduction to empirical
methodology for language researchers. Intended as a handbook to
exploring the empirical dimension of the theoretical questions raised
by Cognitive Linguistics, the volume presents guidelines for employing
methods from a variety of intersecting disciplines, laying out
different ways of gathering empirical evidence. The book is divided
into five sections. Methods and Motivations provides the reader with
the preliminary background in scientific methodology and statistics.
The sections on Corpus and Discourse Analysis, and Sign Language and
Gesture describe different ways of investigating usage data. Behavioral
Research describes methods for exploring mental representation,
simulation semantics, child language development, and the relationships
between space and language, and eye movements and cognition. Lastly,
Neural Approaches introduces the reader to ERP research and to the
computational modeling of language.