This lively lecture series by a leading expert introduces the theory, practice and application of a versatile, rigorous and well-developed approach to cross-linguistic semantics: the NSM approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka. Topics include: history and philosophy of the study of meaning, semantic primes and molecules, emotions, evaluation, verbs and event structure, cultural key words and scripts. Case studies come from English, Chinese, Danish, and other languages. Applications in language teaching and intercultural education are also covered, along with comparisons between NSM and other...

In his ten Beijing lectures, Leonard Talmy represents the range of his work in cognitive semantics. The central concern of this approach is the linguistic representation of conceptual structure, that is, the patterns in which and processes by which conceptual content is organized in language. The lectures examine the semantics of grammar, force dynamics, a typology of how motion events are represented, factive versus fictive motion, a typology of event integration, differences in how spoken and signed language structure space, the attention system of language, introspection as a methodology...

In her Beijing lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers represent...

As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as...

Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics as an Empirical Science details the relationship between form and meaning in language, especially at the systematic level of morphology. The role of metaphor and metonymy in elaborating meaning are investigated, as well as the structuring of semantics in terms of prototypes and radial categories. Implications for cultural studies and pedagogical applications are explored. The bulk of examples and data are drawn from the Slavic languages.

In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change. Croft begins from construction grammar, a theory of syntax in which all syntactic structures are a pairing of form and meaning. Constructions are posited as basic; syntactic categories are defined by constructions. The internal structure of constructions directly link elements of constructions to the meanings they express, Constructions across languages can be situated in a space of syntactic...

The present book contains a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor Zoltán Kövecses in November 2010 as one of the three forum speakers for the 8th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. The topics presented in this book deal with the language and conceptualization of emotions, cross-cultural variation in metaphor, metaphor and metonymy in discourse, and the issue of the relationship between language, mind, and culture from a cognitive linguistic perspective.

The representation of events is a central topic for cognitive science. In this series of lectures, Jeffrey M. Zacks situates event representations and their role in language within a theory of perception and memory. Event representations have a distinctive structure and format that result from computational and neural mechanisms operating during perception and language comprehension. A crucial aspect of the mechanisms is that event representations are updated to optimize their predictive utility. This updating has consequences for action control and for long-term memory. Event cognition...

In this book, Stefan Th. Gries provides an overview on how quantitative corpus methods can provide insights to cognitive/usage-based linguistics and selected psycholinguistic questions. Topics include the corpus linguistics in general, its most important methodological tools, its statistical nature, and the relation of all these topics to past and current usage-based theorizing. Central notions discussed in detail include frequency, dispersion, context, and others in a variety of applications and case studies; four practice sessions offer short introductions of how to compute various corpus...

In Ten Lectures on Event Structure in a Network Theory of Language, Nikolas Gisborne explores verb meaning. He discusses theories of events and how a network model of language-in-the-mind should be theorized; what the lexicon is; how to probe word meaning; evidence for structure in word meaning; polysemy; the lexical semantics of causation; a type hierarchy of events; and event types cross-linguistically. He also looks at the relationship between different classes of events or event types and aktionsarten; transitivity alternations and argument linking. Gisborne argues that the social and...