Search

Integrating research in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, neurophenomenology, and literary studies, The Communicative Mind presents a thought-provoking and multifaceted investigation into linguistic meaning construction. It explores the various ways in which the intersubjectivity of communicating interactants manifests itself in language structure and use and argues for the indispensability of dialogue as a semantic resource in cognition. The view of the mind as highly conditioned by the domain of interpersonal communication is supported by an extensive range of empirical linguistic data from fiction, poetry and written and spoken everyday language, including rhetorically “creative” metaphors and metonymies. The author introduces Cognitive Linguistics to the notion of enunciation, which refers to the situated act of language use, and demonstrates the centrality of subjectivity and turn-taking interaction in natural semantics. The theoretical framework presented takes contextual relevance, viewpoint shifts, dynamicity, and the introduction into discourse of elements with no real-world counterparts (subjective motion, fictivity and other forms of non-actuality) to be vital components in the construction of meaning. The book engages the reader in critical discussions of cognitive-linguistic approaches to semantic construal and addresses the philosophical implications of the identified strengths and limitations. Among the theoretical advances in what Brandt refers to as the cognitive humanities is Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual integration of “mental spaces” which has proved widely influential in Cognitive Poetics and Linguistics, offering a philosophy of language bridging the gap between pragmatics and semantics. With its constructive criticism of the “general mechanism” hypothesis, according to which “blending” can explain everything from the origin of language to binding in perception, Brandt’s book brings the scope and applicability of Conceptual Integration Theory into the arena of scientific debate. The book contains five main chapters entitled Enunciation: Aspects of Subjectivity in Meaning Construction, The Subjective Conceptualizer: Non-actuality in Construal, Conceptual Integration in Semiotic Meaning Construction, Meaning Construction in Literary Text, and Effects of Poetic Enunciation: Seven Types of Iconicity.

This book is about meaning in music, poetry, and language; it is about signs: symbols, icons, diagrams, and more. It concerns art and how we communicate, how we make sense to each otherâ "including the concept of nonsense. It is about metaphor and irony. It embraces a vast human universe of signification and some of its cognitive machines of meaning-making: a complex and diverse unfolding of the expressive human mind. These 24 essays study different aspects of the way we signify, present recent research and models of such processes, and discuss theâ "often intricateâ "problems of understanding the relations between expression and thought. In evolution, music may have preceded the language of words, and music remains indirectly present in every temporal unfolding of bodily, affective, playful, meaningful activity. We are immersed in meaning and have to â ~listenâ (TM) to it since it constitutes the semiotic reality structuring the world as we experience it.

I can't believe it's not butter! (Dairy brand)The paper examines imagined dialogue, a.k.a. fictive (verbal) interaction, in the strategically motivated discourse of advertising campaigns, i.e., discourse designed for the specific purpose of promoting a particular agenda or commercial product. The paper furthermore explores the grammatical aspect of the examined direct-speech metonymies. Though excluded so far from the grammars of Germanic languages, embedded utterances may in fact function as heads or modifiers in syntactic phrases and as sentence functions (e.g., direct object, verb). The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate how embedded utterances function linguistically as well as rhetorically in the discourse of marketing - a particularly high-stakes genre of professional communication - and to stipulate hypotheses concerning strategic motivations for this employment of non-quotational direct speech.