Mappings in Thought and Language

Abstract

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principles operate at the highest levels of scientific, artistic, and literary thought, and at the lower levels of elementary understanding and sentence meaning. Some key cognitive operations are analogical mappings, conceptual integration and blending, discourse management, induction and recursion. The analyses are based on a rich array of attested data in ordinary language, humor, action and design, science, and narratives. Phenomena that receive attention include counterfactuals; time, tense, and mood; opacity; metaphor; fictive motion; grammatical constructions; quantification over cognitive domains.

As we fall asleep we forget about the future: A quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports from hypnagogia

“…It has been used in different versions to successfully link degrees of linguistic references to motor imagery in mentation reports with motor cortical activation of the respective state of consciousness (Speth, Frenzel, & Voss, 2013), to investigate the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on motor imagery (Speth et al, 2015;Speth & Speth, 2016a), and to measure the number of linguistic indications of auditory verbal hallucinations and inner speech in different states of consciousness (Speth, Harley, & Speth, 2016), as well as to investigate memory for the future across states of consciousness (Speth, Schloerscheidt, & Speth, submitted for publication). The second part of the current tool is based on the cognitive-semantic theory of mental spaces by Fauconnier and Turner (Fauconnier, 1994;Fauconnier & Turner, 1997): The method of analysing future, past, and present mental spaces was developed for this study in order to measure if instances of cognitive agency introduced references to future, past, or present scenarios that were imagined or recalled by the participants relative to the mentation time. …”

“…Often cognitive agents build what linguists call mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994;Fauconnier & Turner, 1997). The notion of mental spaces is borrowed from the philosophical concept of possible worlds -although mental spaces are understood as essentially cognitive scenarios that are not necessarily attributed a specific metaphysical value, and nor do they have to be logically consistent.…”

Experimental Pragmatics

“…Important contributors to pragmatic theorising with original points of view include Anscombre & Ducrot (1983); Asher & Lascarides (1995; Bach (1987Bach ( , 1994Bach ( , 1999Bach ( , 2001Bach ( , 2004; Bach & Harnish (1979); Blutner & Zeevat (2003); Clark (1977Clark ( , 1993Clark ( , 1996; Dascal (1981);Ducrot (1984); Fauconnier (1975Fauconnier ( , 1985Fauconnier ( , 1997; Harnish (1976Harnish ( , 1994; Hobbs (1979Hobbs ( , 1985Hobbs ( , 2004; Hobbs et al (1993); Kasher (1976Kasher ( , 1982Kasher ( , 1984Katz (1977); Lewis (1979; Neale (1990Neale ( , 1992Neale ( , 2004; Recanati (1987Recanati ( , 1995Recanati ( , 2002Recanati ( , 2004a; Searle (1969Searle ( , 1975Searle ( , 1979; Stalnaker (1974; Sweetser (1990); Travis (1975Travis ( , 2001; van der Auwera (1981,1985,1997); van Rooy (1999); …”

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

“…In answer to the first worry, we point to the other contributions in this volume. In answer to the second, we note pragmaticists' increasing appeal to inference in their accounts of how the listeners construct the speakers' intended message (Bach, 1994, Barwise, 1983, 2 Carston, 1998, Fauconnier, 1997, Recanati, 1989, Sperber, 1995, and point to the importance of the brain for cognitive activity.…”