Shakespeare’s Brain
- Reading with Cognitive Theory
by Mary Thomas Crane

Here Mary Thomas Crane considers the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest.

Crane's cognitive reading traces the complex interactions of cultural and cognitive determinants of meaning as they play themselves out in Shakespeare's texts. She shows how each play centers on a word or words conveying multiple meanings (such as "act," "pinch," "pregnant," "villain and clown"), and how each cluster has been shaped by early modern ideological formations. The book also chronicles the playwright's developing response to the material conditions of subject formation in early modern England. Crane reveals that Shakespeare in his comedies first explored the social spaces within which the subject is formed, such as the home, class hierarchy, and romantic courtship. His later plays reveal a greater preoccupation with how the self is formed within the body, as the embodied mind seeks to make sense of and negotiate its physical and social environment.

Cognitive Foundations of Grammar
The main function of language is to convey meaning. The question of why language is structured the way it is, Heine here argues, has therefore to be answered first of all with reference to this function. Linguistic explanations in terms of other exponents of language structure, e.g. of syntax, are likely to highlight peripheral or epi-phenomenal rather than central characteristics of language structure. This book uses basic findings on grammaticalization processes to describe the role of cognitive forces in shaping grammar. It provides students with an introductory treatment of a field of linguistics that has developed recently and is rapidly expanding.

A general introduction to the area of theoretical linguistics known as cognitive linguistics, this textbook provides up-to-date coverage of all areas of the field, including recent developments within cognitive semantics (such as Primary Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory, and Principled Polysemy), and cognitive approaches to grammar (such as Radical Construction Grammar and Embodied Construction Grammar). The authors offer clear critical evaluations of competing formal approaches within theoretical linguistics.

Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language (Cognitive Technologies)
The book presents an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge representation and the treatment of semantic phenomena of natural language, which is positioned between artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The proposed method is based on Multilayered Extended Semantic Networks (MultiNets), which can be used for theoretical investigations into the semantics of natural language, for cognitive modeling, for describing lexical entries in a computational lexicon, and for natural language processing (NLP). Part I deals with fundamental problems of semantic knowledge representation and semantic interpretation of natural language phenomena. Part II provides a systematic description of the representational means of MultiNet, one of the most comprehensive and thoroughly specified collections of relations and functions used in real NLP applications. MultiNet is embedded into a system of software tools comprising a workbench for the knowledge engineer, a semantic interpreter translating natural language expressions into formal meaning structures, and a workbench for the computer lexicographer. The book has been used for courses in artificial intelligence at several universities and is one of the cornerstones for teaching computational linguistics in a virtual electronic laboratory.

Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences
Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences is a brief, informative yet informal guide to recent developments in the cognitive neurosciences by the scientists who are in the thick of things.
"Getting a fix on important questions and how to think about them from an experimental point of view is what scientists talk about, sometimes endlessly. It is those conversations that thrill and motivate," observes Michael Gazzaniga. Yet all too often these exciting interactions are lost to students, researchers, and others who are "doing" science. Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences brings together a series of interviews with prominent individuals in neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology that have appeared over the past few years in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
The ten interviews are divided into five sections: basic neuroscience approaches to cognition (Floyd Bloom and Mark Raichle), attentional and perceptual processes (Michael I. Posner and William T. Newsome), neural basis of memory (Randy Gallistel and Endel Tulving), language (Steven Pinker and Alfonso Caramazza), and imagery and consciousness (Stephen M. Kosslyn and Daniel C. Dennett)